Books

Plus some baking

Dear Bread Fans,

I helped my mom with a bake sale this week. I made Hermits and Glo bars at home and we made Buckeyes together at her place. In her little kitchen, I felt myself resisting. We didn't have either of the stainless steel bowls I grew up using, and instead of yards of counter we had just a small patch. My cells were screaming for a replay of what I did as a kid and repeated as an adult. Part of me wanted to bolt out the door and storm the house where other people are making their own cookies. But my mom and I tied on aprons – taken from her laundry nook rather than a hook on the back of the basement door. I settled down and we used her electric hand mixer to mix butter, peanut butter, and confectioners’ sugar. We rolled the mixture into balls and dipped them in chocolate.

Now, I am watching that memory, a story we made together, and laid atop the stories I wanted to replay. Nostalgia gets a bad rap, but how are we going to participate in the moment without comparison? Remembering makes me feel present. (If you want to tell me to meditate, just wait till the new year.) I watch what’s happening and what’s in my head.

A drawing of people watching a parade that I made when I was four.

On the wall in my mom's kitchen, she has a picture I made, of people watching a parade. As a grown-up I’ve loved that I didn’t draw the parade, just the audience. I was watching the watchers, observing what people observed.

I read a great book this week about the audience. Claire Dederer’s Monsters is a wild ride through her life as a critic and through the cultural reckoning of #metoo. There's so much I loved about this book. Of us as the audience in the age of social media, she says, “we’re all wandering around in a mistaken daze of failed telepathy.” Yes! She analyzes Nabokov’s Lolita and brings us to a surprising place. Her wrestling with other artists – and with herself as a writer/mother/monster, is astute. I can't wait to talk with people, especially women writers and artists, who've read it to discuss the monstrous acts of selfishness involved in creating works of art, and what people think about the reckonings the author describes.

I’ve got a few other books to recommend for your reading and gift giving habits.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson looks at the work of cooking, the cook’s individual translation of a recipe, in a novel fashion. I love this book and keep thinking of it as I write, because it pushes the edges of what fits in a book, particularly in a book about food. I think of this book in the kitchen, too. For instance, my mom and I were translating our family cookie classics, weren’t we?

Meth Lunches by Kim Foster & Class by Stephanie Land are both about how poverty impacts access to food. Kim Foster set up a pantry in her front yard during the pandemic, and her book maps food security's impacts on her Las Vegas neighbors, tracing addiction, housing issues and the impossibilities of the foster care system through personal intersections. For more about Kim Foster, check out my interview with her here.

Stephanie Land's second memoir – her first was Maid & became a TV series – deals with her last years of college as a single mother, and the hunger that she and her daughter faced while pursuing access, supposedly, to the middle class. I’ve blurbed Meth Lunches and Class at Civil Eats, which has put together a great bundle of winter reading/holiday giving recs.

The Lost Supper by Taras Grescoe explores the future of food through food's several pasts. He dives into the archaeology of taste and covers a lot of contemporary ground, studying food in a conversational fashion through the lenses of anthropology, biodiversity, climate change and nutrition. The bread section is fantastic.

For the Culture Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food: Interviews, Inspiration, and Recipes by Klancy Miller. Cookbook author Klancy Miller launched a magazine to celebrate Black women in food. The idea was so popular, and filled such a yawning chasm, that a book offer derailed publication after the first issue. This book is the joyous, thoughtful, and visually stunning result.

Bread and Roses: 100+ Grain Forward Recipes featuring Global Ingredients and Botanicals by Rose Wilde is terrific! Rose is a former civil rights lawyer and applies her considerable imagination to ingredients. Freshly ground flours and off-grid grains are basic pantry ingredients, and her instructions on bread and pastry making are solid for beginners, and stepped up for bakers who are more involved.

Let's Bake Bread! A Family Cookbook to Foster Learning, Curiosity, and Skill Building in Your Kids by Bonnie Ohara. I’m a huge fan of Bonnie, who uses natural leavening and freshly milled whole grains at her cottage bakery in Northern California. She’s always incorporated her family into her work, and in this accessible book – her second book – she invites families into the connectivity of baking.

I’d love to hear what you are reading or giving, and if you do, in a comment below, I’ll enter your name in a chance to win either Meth Lunches or The Lost Supper. (I can only ship to the continental US, okay?)

Happy reading and baking,

Amy

Note: If you want recipes for Hermit cookies and Glo bars, they are within the posts I’ve linked.