Book: Spoon Fed by Kim Severson

or How Eight Cooks Saved My Life

If you're a foodie, you will probably like this book. It's Kim story of moving to Alaska and writing about restaurants and food, falling in love, becoming an alcoholic and then finding a way out. She leaves Alaska and moves to the Bay area, newly sober, after landing a job with the San Francisco Chronicle. She eventually became a food writer for the New York Times.

Along the way, she meets Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachel Ray and other influential cooks and writes about them and her interviews with them.

"Each meal contains a thousand little divine mysteries...What blessed entity invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans or figured out that salt can preserve and brighten anything?....and what of the miracle that is cheese? Things get more mysteriously divine  if you start to think about baking. Or how olive oil and garlic and egg yolk can make a glimmering, thick aioli. Mixing hot stock into a cold roux so it won't make lumps...."

There is a wonderful story of Leah Chase and her New Orleans restaurant, Dooky Chase: "And there was always a table for musicians and African American artists like Jacob Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett, who would hang their work on her walls. Traveling musicians knew a visit to New Orleans would not be complete without a stop at Dooky's. 'We fed all of them,' she said, 'King Cole, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, everybody. Everybody came. Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughn...'"

There is Edna Lewis, now old and demented and frail, and lovingly cared for by"a young chef named Scott Peacock."

She includes her mother's recipe for Spaghetti and Meatballs (the meatballs pretty much like the ones I have always made, although the sauce is different in that it has pepperoncini, chuck roast and pork spareribs in it so is probably tastier).

She goes to see Marcella Hazan who wrote The Classic Italian Book Book, a book her mother had sent when she was 23 and just out of college. When Kim visited her, Marcella lived on Longboat Key in Florida with her attentive husband Victor and, with high expectations, she visits them, but with somewhat disconcerting sequelae as can happen when reality and dreams collide.

All these stories about inspired cooks and cookbooks and food and recipes...

Now I have to find and taste Meyer lemons...