Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen, with Recipes - Hardcover

Lust, Teresa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883642957 ISBN 13: 9781883642952

Publisher: Steerforth, 1998

Synopsis

Pass the Polenta offers up kitchen secrets, tricks of the trade, and lessons in life learned at the stoves of the many seasoned cooks in Lust's world: an Italian immigrant grandmother who plucked chickens in the backyard; an introverted mushroom-forager who accompanied her to the woods to collect chanterelles; a German auntie who learned to knead bread dough in a wooden bucket. These mentors are ordinary folk, all of them, going about their daily business of baking bread and pouring hearty wine. Their stories eloquently demonstrate that cooking is an expression of art and of love, of family and self, of soil and the seasons.

About this title

Review

Pass the Polenta is a collection of essays about home cooking, which is to say it's a book about home and family and tradition and the unspoken connectedness that comes of people pushing their knees under a table and passing plates of food back and forth.

Pass the Polenta is a book about taking forward from the past all that is relevant, and savoring as memory those elements that serve better as the fodder for stories. For Lust, unlike too many food writers, doesn't simply like the idea of food as something to carry on about, she likes to eat and to cook, to dine with friends and family, and she draws this passion into her writing. When she's cooking at her keyboard, you can taste her best work on the page. And then there is the handful of recipes at the back of the book: stew and polenta, roast chicken, her grandmother's pie, sauerkraut, and potato and leek soup, among others. Connections.

Teresa Lust hails from central Washington State, where agriculture is king. She's Italian on her mother's side of the family--hence the polenta of the title. Somehow a biology degree pushed her into commercial cooking, and commercial cooking got her moving from Washington to California, then from California to New England, where she turned her attention to writing as well as cooking, and earned an M.F.A. It's a happy marriage for Lust, this sense that what's on the plate is more than food, this sense that words on a page can be more than information. It's all to the reader's benefit. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

These essays on the pleasures of simple food are uniformly charming, but it is that very uniformity that sabotages the collection. Over and over again, Lust, a former restaurant chef, uses folksy character sketches to prove that old ways and peasant food outdo fussy techniques and nouvelle cuisine. In "Easy as Pie" it's Lust's grandmother who instructs her on making a pie crust that beats out the pate brisee of French-trained pastry chefs. In "The Same Old Stuffing," she berates food magazine editors who promote "the smoked quail, the spicy black bean stuffing, and the sun-dried tomato and arugula gratin" for Thanksgiving and waxes nostalgic about the two types of stuffing (one with sage and onion and another with sausage, spinach, raisins, and nuts) served on her family's holiday table. "Daily Grind" compares the coffee that emerges from the ancient stovetop coffeemaker of Lust's Italian aunt to the sad brews sold under Italian jargon in American coffee bars. While these observations are undoubtedly true, they are repetitious and often verge on cliche. Recipes for homey dishes (sauerkraut, scones) are explained in their essays, and then written out more formally at the end of the book. Like the essays, these dishes are familiar yet satisfying.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1883642957
• ISBN 13: 9781883642952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269