Now that I am—finally!—counting down the days and not the years until the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl’s Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia, I have found myself more and more curious about the other contenders in my subgenre: the memoir with recipes.
It came as no surprise that memoirs with recipes lean heavily toward the crosscultural and international. Nothing evokes the reality of having a foot in more than one reality than the different, even conflicting tastes you develop along the way. Being an international person means always being hungry for something you can’t get.
Which means I felt no small delight that the first such memoir I stumbled across also had an eastern European tie, namely Boris Fishman’s Savage Feast. (It just so happens that this is also the first audiobook I ever listened to—other than, while I was hiking through Spain in 2016, the crowd-sourced LibriVox production of Don Quixote). Extra bonus, Savage Feast is narrated by the author! It traces his family’s emigration from Soviet Belarus to the U.S. via Rome and what the dislocation wrought on him, his parents, and his grandparents. Let me just say that his roast chicken stuffed with crepes was a total revelation in this household: I don’t think we’ve ever attacked and dismantled a bird with such fervor before.
This happy first discovery from eastern Europe was unrepresentative, sadly. The closest kin I’ve found are Elizabeth Gowing’s Travels in Blood and Honey, recounting her time in Kosovo with her diplomat husband and becoming a beekeeper amidst all that fraught and painful history, and Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen, which recounts the author’s split self between her divorced parents’ heritages and finding her way back to Berlin in the end to make her own life. Gowing’s recipes are documentary and therefore rather inaccessible outside of Kosovo. Weiss’s are German, Italian, and generally more accessible to an American cook. While both memoirs were rich in detail, neither had a particularly compelling through-line to drive the narrative onward.
It’s hard luck for anyone who wants to write about European food that is not French food, however, because the Anglo-American market has an apparently insatiable desire to read about les Français and their cuisine. This long predates memoirs with recipes: see Waverly Root, Elizabeth David, and (of course) Julia Child, with a soupçon of Alice Waters thrown in. No surprise that in the marketplace of memoirs with recipes, France figures heavily.
David Lebovitz probably sets the gold standard in The Sweet Life in Paris for his comical account of all the things Americans find perplexing—but also enchanting—about the city of lights. The recipes lean heavily on the sweet (as you might expect with a title like that) but there are savories in there, too. It’s light cross-cultural comedy, clean shaven of any real sorrow or drama.
Likewise the pair of memoirs from Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence. The first tells, in a gee-whiz-don’t-I-have-a-great-life kind of tone (with completely unconvincing attempts at self-deprecation), the affair with a Frenchman that led to marriage and eventually life in Paris, a fluffy beachside kind of read. The sequel had a little more heft, partly due to the genuine struggle of starting an ice cream shop in a small Provençal village, more in the challenges that motherhood brought to Bard’s emotional life. More than the narrative, her recipes look to me like a good place to start if you’ve never quite gotten the point of French food. (But moving there would be better.)
But one thing I have learned from reading all kinds of memoirs, including the recipe-less kind, is that, contrary to Lebovitz and Bard, pain is the major driver of the memoirist. Because sometimes crossing cultures is not an entertaining, ennobling, expanding experience of the other. Sometimes it’s just being fractured in two.
So it was for Diana Abu-Jabar, a Jordanian-American telling her coming-of-age story in The Language of Baklava, and even more so for her father, who never quite found his footing again after leaving Jordan, despite trying again and again to move back. A problematic father dominates Leslie Li’s Daughter of Heaven as well, along with some iffy ancestors farther back. Apricots on the Nile comes off most bitter of all, given author Colette Rossant’s experience of abandonment by her parents. Too bad, as the bitterness cloaks her otherwise unique portrayal of a French-born girl growing up in Cairo in the 1930s and 40s. While all three of these memoirs were powerfully evocative, they struggled to find their story, and the good cheer of the good food somehow didn’t quite mesh with the darkness they were all working to overcome.
You might conclude that “memoirs with recipes” cannot also be “pain memoirs”: they just don’t go together, like peanut butter and Chardonnay. Fishman succeeded in Savage Feast, though, and even more so did Sasha Martin in Life from Scratch, a book born of a blog. As painful family origin stories go, Martin might just win first prize—her tale is laced with of persecution by misguided social services, abuse by a priest, suicide, abandonment, rejection, alcohol abuse, illness… and yet. I read the whole thing in a day, and not because I have a thing for pain porn. I don’t. Rather, it’s because Martin has mastered her grief and turned it into wisdom. The story is heartbreaking but not self-indulgent. There are no easy fixes, but things do get better. Instead of shutting down, she ultimately opened up—all the way up to a project of cooking from every country in the world. I came away hungry, and happy, neither of which I expected going into it. (Her blog is still live; check out her Slovakia recipes here.)
And that concludes my informal survey of the memoir-with-recipes, but surely there are more. If you know any that I should read, please drop me a line!
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