Two More Books for the End of Summer

When I wrote my recent post about four irresistible summer reads, I had a nagging feeling that I left off one I really wanted to tell you about. I didn’t realize it until after I pressed “publish,” of course.

I figured you always want to know about great food-focused books to read, right? And now I have two  for you, because many people left comments about their favorite reads on the last post, and I am starting to read those books too:

1. The book I forgot to list was A Fork in the Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure & Discovery on the Road, a first-rate book of essays edited by James Oseland, who just left Saveur magazine as editor-in-chief.

“Every traveler has two or three or even a hundred of them: moments on a journey when you taste something and you’re forever changed,” writes Oseland in the book’s introduction.”It might be a fancy or dazzling dish served by a tuxedoed waiter, or it might simply be an unexpected flavor or unfamiliar ingredient, offered by strangers and encountered by happenstance. At their most intense, these tastes of the new reveal something elemental about the place you’re in, and about yourself. These are the kinds of experiences I asked the writers in this book to capture in their stories.”

And what a line-up. Here is Jay Raynor, who writes for the London Guardian, on eating oysters on the island of Mersea; Gael Greene, the famous New York food critic, on eating in the Amazon; and Matin Yan, writing touchingly about a two-room shack where he grew up, eating his single mother’s cooking. There are so many more excellent authors. In fact, this book is a who’s who of famous food writers.

So if you want to see how to write an excellent personal narrative about food, look no further. And don’t read this book just to learn. Read it because you’ll devour it. The essays are funny, insightful, emotional and tightly written. So learn, enjoy, and then get out your essay, polish it and send it out.

2. I listed a memoir, The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu-Jaber, in my previous post. In the comments, cookbook author Nancie McDermott said she enjoyed Birds of Paradise, a novel by the same author. The protagonist is a professional baker who makes high-end pastries at home alone, in an effort to understand herself and her life — or maybe to avoid it too.

Just the descriptions of what she bakes will send you over the edge: “…she dusted her pastry slab with jets of flour and began the daylong process of making mille-feuilles. She drove the flour and sugar before her on the slab, drew its vapors into her lungs, knowing that this work — the most challenging and imperial of pastry creation — might have the power to save her.”

And this:

“Avis labored over her pastries: her ingredient base grew, combining worlds: preserved lemons from Morocco in a Provencal tart; Syrian olive oil in Neapolitan cantuccini; salt combed from English marshes and filaments of Kashmiri saffron secreted within a Swedish cream. By the time Avis was in college, her baking had evolved to a level of exquisite accomplishment: each pastry as unique as a snowflake, just as fleeting on the tongue: pellucid jams colored cobalt and lavender, biscuits light as eiderdown.”

(She likes colons.)

The novel is set in Miami, which I visited for the first time when I went to BlogHer Food in May. I recognized the tropical, sensuous landscape at once. Avis lives on a street perfumed with jacaranda flowers and bakes her heart out while the her life, and that of family members, falls apart. It’s a complex story, with wildly sensuous writing.

So happy long weekend, if you live in the US or Canada. I hope you get a few moments of alone with a book.