Dinner with Edward

Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Nonfiction - Memoir
2016 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Finished on November 25, 2019
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

When Isabel meets Edward, both are at a crossroads: he wants to follow his late wife to the grave, and she is ready to give up on love. Thinking she is merely helping Edward’s daughter--who lives far away and has asked her to check in on her nonagenarian dad in New York--Isabel has no idea that the man in the kitchen baking the sublime roast chicken and light-as-air apricot soufflé will end up changing her life.

As Edward and Isabel meet weekly for the glorious dinners that Edward prepares, he shares so much more than his recipes for apple galette or the perfect martini, or even his tips for deboning poultry. Edward is teaching Isabel the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything she does, to deconstruct her own life, cutting it back to the bone and examining the guts, no matter how messy that proves to be.

Dinner with Edward is a book about love and nourishment, and about how dinner with a friend can, in the words of M. F. K. Fisher, "sustain us against the hungers of the world."

It's been over three years since my blogging friend, JoAnn, of Gulfside Musing, reviewed this slim memoir (posted here) after picking it up at an independent bookstore while on vacation in Colorado. She was very thoughtful and sent me the book once she was finished, but it wasn't until a few days ago that I was finally inspired to take it down from the shelf and begin reading. (Thank you, Nonfiction November challenge!) JoAnn read the entire book on her flight home and I was able to read it in just one day, as well. I adore memoirs, particularly those with a culinary focus, and I was quickly drawn into Isabel's delightful stories about her unique friendship with Edward. 

Edward was neither a snob nor an insufferable foodie. He just liked to do things properly. He cared deeply about everything he created--whether it was the furniture in his living room or his writing. He had built and upholstered all of the furniture himself and wrote out his poems and short stories in longhand, patiently rewriting each draft on unlined white paper until he felt it was good enough to be typed by one of his daughters. He treated cooking much the same way, even though he had started doing it late in life, in his seventies. "Paula cooked for fifty-two years, and one day I just told her she'd done enough work, and now it was my turn," he said.

My only quibble is the lack of recipes. However, Edward states:

"It's just cooking, darling," he said, when I asked why he didn't use cookbooks. "I don't ever think of what I'm doing in terms of recipes. I just don't want to bother looking at recipes. To me, that's not cooking - being tied to a piece of paper."

Ah, but I am tied to a piece of paper. I need recipes! I guess I'll have to resort to Googling the various items listed in each menu and see what I can come up with. 

As with many of my favorite culinary memoirs, Dinner with Edward is not just about food, but also about life and the deep friendships and conversations shared over a delicious meal. Sure to appeal to fans of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and Ann Hood's Kitchen Yarns, Isabel Vincent's splendid memoir will not disappoint.

Thank you, JoAnn, for sharing this lovely little book with me. It has found a place next to my favorite memoirs and is one that I will pick up again when I am in need of a comfort read.

Keeping the Feast

Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini
Nonfiction - Memoir
2010 Riverhead Books
Finished on July 28, 2016
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met as foreign correspondents in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But not even a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred away from their Italian paradise when John was shot and nearly killed on the job. The period of physical and mental suffering that followed marked the abrupt end of what they'd known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.

They followed their instincts and returned to the place they loved, Italy, and there they found a lifeline of sorts. As John struggled to regain his health and Paula reexamined her assumptions about illness and recovery, it was food and its rituals--the daily shopping, preparing, sharing, and memory of food--that kept them moving forward. Food became a symbol of the family's innate desire to survive, to accept, and to celebrate what fell its way.

Keeping the Feast is an inspiring story of what happens when tragedy strikes a previously happy marriage and a couple must fight to find its bearings. It is a testament to the extraordinary sustaining powers of food and love, to the healing that can come from the simple rituals of life, even during life's biggest challenges, and to the stubborn belief that there is always an afterward, always hope.

My dear friend Meredith sent me this book waaaay back in 2010. I was so excited to read it, but as we all know, reading is driven by moods and for whatever reason, this book didn't call out to me as quickly as I thought it would. It languished in the bookcase until I finally decided the time was right. It was summertime and I was eager for some armchair travel, so I dove in and was quickly transported to Italy.

We moved into a small apartment near the Tiber on one of those golden October days so perfect that you could never imagine willingly leaving the city again. Every morning I would walk down our narrow street toward the hubbub of Campo dei Fiori, where the flower sellers, the fruit vendors, the vegetable sellers, the fishmongers, the mushroom lady, the bread shop, the lamb and chicken lady, the pork butcher, the notions man, the meat vans, the olive and herbs vendors, the newspaper kiosk, the housewares stand, and the roving garlic salesmen from Bangladesh were always open for business no matter how early I awakened.

Morning after morning for an entire year, I walked to the Campo before most people were up. Noisy, honking, shouting Rome is almost quiet at that hour, and what began as a simple routine soon took on the trappings of ritual. I woke up early, dressed, walked out the door and over to the Campo. I would buy a shiny, plump purple-black eggplant. Or a handful of slender green beans, or fresh and young you could eat them raw. I brought three golden pear, or a heavy bunch of fat, green grapes. I bought a few slices of Milanese salami, a bit of veal. I bought a thin slab of creamy gorgonzola, to spread on crusty, still-warm bread. I bought milk, yogurt, butter, and eggs, and finally the newspapers. Then I would head home, stopping in the tiny church of Santa Brigida, which lay halfway between the Campo and our apartment. The first few months, I would rest my bundles on the cold marble floor, kneel for a moment at the back of the church under the gaze of a painted Madonna, and try not to cry. Months later, I would still kneel for a moment in the same spot, but when I felt the tears coming, I'd make a fist and pound once or twice on the pew in front of me. It made a fitting, hollow sound in the almost empty church. Then I would collect my bundles and continue my short walk home.

I needed both parts of the ritual, the buying of the food and the stopping in the church. We all must eat, and there is nothing more normal than buying the food that keeps us alive. When I performed the ritual of buying our daily bread, the world seemed more normal. Pounding a pew a few minutes later brought home how far from normal I still felt.

Buttarini's memoir isn't just about food and living in Italy. It's about a terrible act of violence. I found myself nodding in agreement.

Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent passerby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don't happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn't been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family's life savings. Shocks like these hammer the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.

But she does write some mouth-watering passages about food that had me reaching for my Post-It notes and longing to move to Italy!

John and I quickly fell into a routine of meeting Joseph on the terrace that overlooked the lake to eat our meals together. We started around eight, with thick slices of crusty country bread, with butter and jams from the garden's fruit trees, perhaps a bit of cheese or yogurt with honey from the hives that stood below the house, and mugs of strong, milky tea. After working in the garden or doing other small chores, we met again for "elevenses," milky coffee and a couple of simple, store-bought cookies, so we could keep our hunger at bay till the main midday meal about one p.m. I happily took on the cooking: a simple pasta or risotto to start; then a bit of sauteed veal or chicken and a vegetable from the garden; a green salad tossed with olive oil, lemon, and sugar--as Joseph liked it--then fruit, followed by the inevitable siesta.

Final Thoughts:

I love a good foodie memoir, but about halfway into this book, I began to lose interest. Hating to give up on a book that so many of my friends raved about, I pushed on, hoping to finish with at least a 3-star rating. I enjoyed the descriptions of the food and meals shared with family and friends, but Keeping the Feast is such a bleak story. The author was beaten, her husband shot, her mother suffered from depression and then her husband dealt with the same, and on and on it goes. I decided to take a break for about a month, but after that I didn't have any desire to finish the book. So much for a 3-star rating.

Tout Sweet

 

Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels for a New Life in France by Karen Wheeler

Nonfiction - Memoir

2011 Sourcebooks, Inc.

Finished on 7/15/12

Rating: 3/5 (So-so)

Paris in July Challenge 2012

My new home has no indoor loo, no bathtub, no kitchen sink and no hot water. It has flowery brown wallpaper in almost every room, damp climbing up the crumbly walls and a gaping hole looking down into a dank cellar instead of a kitchen floor. Then there’s the pile of rubbish the size of the Pyrenees in the rear courtyard. I don’t even have the clothes for this kind of life. After a decade and a half of working in fashion, most of my wardrobe is designed for going to cocktail parties—or, at the very least, breakfast at Claridges—and my shoes are so high that I need a Sherpa and an oxygen tank to wear them.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Thirtysomething fashion editor Karen has it all: a handsome boyfriend, a fabulous flat in west London, and an array of gorgeous shoes. But when her boyfriend leaves, she makes an unexpected decision: to hang up her Manolos and wave good-bye to her glamorous city lifestyle to go it alone in a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, central western France.

Acquiring a host of new friends and unsuitable suitors, she learns that true happiness might be found in the simplest of things—a bike ride through the countryside on a summer evening, or a glass of wine or three in her neighbor’s courtyard.

Tout Sweet is the perfect read for anyone who dreams of chucking away their BlackBerry in favor of real blackberrying and downshifting to a romantic, alluring locale where new friendships, and new loves, are just some of the treasures to be found amongst life’s simple pleasures.

For me, a book full of Post-It flags is typically the sign of a great read. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Tout Sweet. My dear friend Bellezza sent me this book many months ago and it wasn’t until the Paris in July challenge began that I felt compelled to pick it up. I read it in bits and pieces over the course of two weeks and enjoyed it well enough, but it’s not one that I’m singing praises of. There was just something missing that kept it from becoming a hit.

As mentioned, I found several passages worth noting, in spite of my lackluster reaction to this memoir.

On le “colourful” style Français:

And now, here I am, just over a year since I signed the acte final, standing outside Maison Coquelicot, feeling panicked by what I have taken on. I have a feeling that she—for I have decided that the house is definitely feminine—is going to be quite a handful. It doesn’t help that what I know about DIY could be written on the back of a button and that my practical skills start and end at unscrewing lipsticks and spraying scent onto tester strips.

I stand in the fierce afternoon sun of the Poitou-Charentes and try to visualize the façade re-rendered with lime plaster and painted creamy white, the dull brown shutters transformed with a coat of pale blue-grey, and hot pink geraniums in terracotta pots lined up on the windowsills. My mission, I remind myself, is to restore this unloved little house to a thing of beauty—to turn Maison Coquelicot into the quintessence of le style Francais. I will give this sad little house back its soul and, in the process, I will learn to lead a simpler, less superficial and more connected life (and stop buying so many pairs of shoes).

In contrast to the fashionably minimal décor of my old flat in London, I plan to fill Maison Coquelicot with colour and rustic comforts. The petit salon will be decorated with chintz curtains, colourful rugs and fat sofas piled high with faded floral cushions. The kitchen will have open shelving crammed with storage jars, colourful old china and wooden bowls filled with plump aubergines, lemons and bell peppers. And in the bedrooms I will have cream-coloured iron beds covered with linen sheets and flowery patterned eiderdowns, while the dressing table will overflow with antique perfume bottles and bath oils.

I will fill the small courtyard with scented roses, orange-pink geraniums, climbing jasmine and herbs growing in terracotta pots as well as beaten-up wicker chairs and an antique wrought iron table. I will string a row of twinkling fairy lights along the stone walks, watering can in one hand and a glass of ice-cold rose in the other. Maison Coquelicot will burst with colour and pattern and pieces of furniture that look like they have been there forever. There will be stacks of colourful books at every turn, jugs of sweet peas, roses and peonies placed on every surface and candles and antique mirrors in every room. And, most importantly of all, there will be a roaring fire (and willow baskets overflowing with logs) in the petit salon, so that in the evening the house will glow with warmth.

Hmmm, apparently Karen needs to find another word for “colorful.”

On French food markets:

There is a food market taking place in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral and, unlike the few stalls that pass for a market in Villiers, this appears to be the real French deal. People are bustling around with baskets or pull-along shopping trolleys, squeezing, sniffing or sampling the goods. Many stalls sell just one product—goat’s cheese, artichokes or exotic looking breads[…]

The produce itself looks very alluring: purple-green cabbages sprouting like big flower brooches, small black prunes glistening like jet beads, heads of purple and white garlic strung together like a necklace. There are aubergines, the same opulent shade of purple-black as a YSL smoking, piles of large mushrooms, their undersides pleated like a Vionnet gown, and stalls selling pungent frills of parsley and basil or velvety green leaves of sage, while plump and shiny red and green peppers nestle in wooden boxes. Unfortunately, none of this is much use to me as I am weeks, if not months, away from a functioning kitchen and mostly living on bread and Brie.

On walking in the French countryside:

And so, on Sunday afternoon on the first day of spring, I put on my trainers and start to walk. I tell myself that I will just walk to the next village of St. Maurice, which is about half a mile away. I walk downhill from Villiers towards the old village with its hotchpotch of old houses with mismatched terracotta-tiled roofs, the peeling paint of the blue-grey shutters visible in the spring sunshine and an explosion of orange-pink geraniums on doorsteps and windowsills. The smell of woodsmoke and damp earth has been replaced by a fresh greenness—notes of green shoots and sap combined with a hint of white florals, most noticeably jasmine. Crossing the little stone bridge, I arrive at the twelfth-century church which has lain on my doorstep, unexplored, for a full seven months.

Ah. The ubiquitous blue-grey shutters and orange-pink geraniums. ;)

On life’s simple pleasures:

I find pleasure in the simple, daily rituals of French life: waking up to the peal of church bells and birds singing above the high stone walls; throwing open the shutters first thing to the sight of sunshine and geraniums; walking up to the bakery on the square to buy freshly baked croissants. And then, after a day working at my computer, the early evening ritual of watering the roses and the potted herbs—basil, sage, chives and rosemary—in the courtyard signifies that it’s time to relax. My favourite ritual of all, however, is hanging out the washing. Having lived in a top-floor flat with no outside space for most of my last ten years in London, being able to peg my clothes on a washing line and watch as they sway seductively in a subtle breeze is a real luxury. There is no bottled scent as lovely as that of just-washed cotton sheets hung out to dry in the sun. Finally, I have found pleasures that do not involve a credit card.

In addition to the repetitive nature of Wheeler’s descriptions, I have another quibble about the author’s style. On many occasions, she will have one individual speaking a line or two of dialogue and within the same paragraph, another person will reply. Here is just one example:

It turned out that Dave had also invited an English friend, Miranda, to dinner. “I think you’ll like her,” he said. “She’s been living out here for about ten years and she’s hilarious.”

“How do you know her?” I asked. “She’s helped me out a lot with translation. I met her in the estate agent’s office when she was doing some translating for Victor.”

Those last two lines in red are spoken by Dave, not Karen. It became very confusing trying to sort of who was saying what. This may be isolated to the ARC, but I don’t have a copy of the finished product available to compare the text. I certainly hope that this was all sorted out before the final press run.

Speaking of Dave, I did not care for him (or his obnoxious son) one bit! I didn’t trust him and felt he was using Karen. He conveniently forgot his wallet on more than one occasion, forcing Karen to loan him quite a bit of money, which he never seemed to think was a big deal. It was a very strange friendship and I was never quite sure where it was heading.

I also thought it a bit odd to end the final paragraph of this book with the following:

…And as I turn into the square in Villiers, my heart beats just a little faster at the thought of my new neighbour, who is heading home with my telephone number—so casually asked for—in his pocket. Have you enjoyed this book?

Final Thoughts: In spite of its flaws, Tout Sweet is a mildly entertaining travel memoir. Bellezza and Andi both loved the book, so please read their reviews (here and here) before deciding against it simply because of my ho-hum review.

You may read more about Wheeler’s life in France here.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future by Michael J. Fox
Nonfiction
2010 Hyperion
Finished on 7/10/10
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fair)




Product Description:

Michael J. Fox abandoned high school to pursue an acting career, but went on to receive honorary degrees from several universities and garner the highest accolades for his acting, as well as for his writing. In his new book, he inspires and motivates graduates to recognize opportunities, maximize their abilities, and roll with the punches—all with his trademark optimism, warmth, and humor.

In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future, Michael draws on his own life experiences to make a case that real learning happens when "life goes skidding sideways." He writes of coming to Los Angeles from Canada at age eighteen and attempting to make his way as an actor. Fox offers up a comically skewed take on how, in his own way, he fulfilled the requirements of a college syllabus. He learned Economics as a starving artist; an unexpected turn as a neophyte activist schooled him in Political Science; and his approach to Comparative Literature involved stacking books up against their movie versions.

Replete with personal stories and hilarious anecdotes, Michael J. Fox's new book is the perfect gift for graduates.

Weighing in at 100 pages and consumed in under 2 hours, Fox's slim book is reminiscent of Anna Quindlen's Being Perfect and A Short Guide to a Happy Life. They're those short little books that wind up on every bookstore's "Gifts for Grads" table and, while they may seem like a perfect gift, they're easily forgotten—much like that valedictorian speech.

So what did I learn from Fox's self-deprecating script? Well, I disovered that Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Kevin Bacon, John Travolta, Hilary Swank, Jim Carrey, Charlie Sheen, Sean Connery, Al Pacino, and Quentin Tarantino all have something in common—they never graduated from high school.

I found two quotes worth marking:

No matter how fantastic a movie's premise is, there are always a special few who buy in and accept the craziest shit at face value, like the hoverboard. I've fielded more questions about hoverboards than any other aspect of the trilogy. Otherwise sane people were convinced that these devices actually existed, especially after Bob Zemeckis made tongue-in-cheek comments to the press about parent groups preventing toy manufacturers from putting them on the market (this resulted in hundreds of kids calling Mattel, demanding hoverboards for Christmas).

and

In my experience, a mentor doesn't necessarily tell you what to do, but more importantly, tells you what they did or might do, then trusts you to draw your own conclusions and act accordingly. If you succeed, they'll take one step back, and if you screw up, they'll take one step closer. Whatever it is they teach you...pass it on.

And, that's about it. Hilarious anecdotes? Not so much. But I've always admired Alex P. Keaton Michael J. Fox and can highly recommend his earlier work, Lucky Man. I haven't had a chance to read his latest memoir, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, but I'm sure it's a bit more inspiring than this little Cliffs Notes version of his life.

For more information about Michael J. Fox, please take a look at the following links:

Michael J. Fox Theater

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research