I do not consider myself a “food writer,” which is probably pretty stupid since my last book was definitely at least partly a “food book.” (It’s also cultural history and sort of biography and maybe a dash of arts criticism, but who is counting.)
However: I do love a good food book, and we are living in an age of them. Some of my favorites are commonly cited by others, too, particularly The Supper of the Lamb, which if pressed I’ll claim as my very favorite.
The only purpose of this post is to draw your eye toward two new favorites.
The first is Tamar Adler’s new cookbook, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, which I spotted on a bookstore table recently, squealed, and bought immediately. Adler’s book An Everlasting Meal is one of my great loves, a weirdly literary little book that reads like a narrative, except it’s a narrative about, like, all the things you can do with a pot of beans. Adler in turn says it’s an homage to M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, a book intended for lean times, and both work for lean times and otherwise, especially in a world where food waste is a miserable habit. (The US throws out 40% of the food it produces!)
I knew Adler’s new cookbook, loosely related to An Everlasting Meal, was on the way, because she told me when I interviewed her for a piece on expiration dates on labels a couple summers ago. (She used a naughty grown-up word when we were talking to describe the food systems of the US, and I chose to quote her since she meant it emphatically rather than obscenely, and boy do I get email about that. No regrets, sorry.)
I don’t know if the cookbook has any grown-up words, but I do know it’s delightful. It’s split into sections by broad food category (fruits, veggies, pickled things, meat, sweet things, dough, and so on), with the idea that you’d look through your refrigerator to find things that are just about to tip into oblivion, look them up in the book, and find something to make with it. I think I was sold when I spotted two entries next to one another in the “Fruit” section: “Mango, Unripe” and “Mango, Overripe.” Perfection.
The other is my good friend Adam McHugh’s memoir Blood From a Stone: A Memoir of How Wine Brought Me Back from the Dead, which has this absolutely delightful vintage-y looking cover. Adam and I have known each other for a while (like ten years? Or so?), having first bumped into one another at a Glen Workshop in Santa Fe and then taught two seminars together in subsequent years. Those were slightly … amorphous … workshops, since we’re both writers who are passionate about food (me) and wine (him, well, and me, but he knows his stuff). Linford Detweiler (of Over the Rhine) referred to them as “spiritual eating” workshops. He wasn’t wrong.
Anyhow we’re not here to talk about me. Blood from a Stone is a pretty incredible book, weaving together the history and culture of wine with Adam’s own story, which goes through chaplaincy and burnout and dreams disappointed and into the ways that taste, soil, grapes, sunshine, and, well, wine can be a force of renewal for the land and for the individual soul. You don’t have to like or drink wine to read it, of course. It’s bigger than that.
But it’s very beautiful either way, and enhanced by a great wine on the side. Adam’s the real deal, a thing I know because he does occasionally mail me random, unmarked bottles of incredible California wine and more often texts me to make sure I’m actually writing when I claim to be. But I hope you buy his book, and love it as much as I do.