Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens (California Studies in Food and Culture) Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought a copy of this book for myself, and by the end of the week also bought a copy for my mother for her birthday. I know she'll love it for the same reasons I do: Lovely writing, fascinating oral histories of immigrants to America who carry their home traditions to the US through cooking and sharing family meals, and really wonderful recipes. I know this won't be the only time I give this book as a gift!
I love the writing of MFK Fisher, and Lynne Anderson brings that same sensibility to this book; a great understanding of how food and cooking can bring both solace and celebration to our lives, and a wonderful eye for the details of creating a meal. I've also made one of the recipes in this book--ok, it was for the easiest recipe, for hummous. But I've made it 2x in the last week, and it's broken me of my habit of buying Sabra hummous in the (overpriced NYC) grocery stores! It's so inexpensive and easy to make--plus it's just fantastic! I want to make some of the other recipes, like the stuffed grape leaves. And the Irish recipe--and maybe some of the African ones, once I feel a little more ambitious!
Anderson clearly knows her stuff--the book jacket says she cooked for years, and also is a teacher. Her sense of the importance of good food (and complete dismissal of the elitist cult of foodism) is palpable. I could go on and on--but I guess I've made it clear I'm a fan. And I don't buy cookbooks any more, feeling that I can get any recipe off the internet. But the combination of recipes + oral histories from people who moved here from other cultures was irresistible to me, and I'm so glad I took the plunge.
And I'm having hummous later today--I'll make back the price of this book on what I save by not getting store-bought any more.

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Through stories of hand-rolled pasta and homemade chutney, local markets and backyard gardens, and wild mushrooms and foraged grape leaves--this book recounts in loving detail the memories, recipes, and culinary traditions of people who have come to the United States from around the world. Chef and teacher Lynne Anderson has gone into immigrant kitchens and discovered the power of food to recall a lost world for those who have left much behind. The enticing, easy-to-prepare recipes feature specialties like Greek dolmades, Filipino adobo, Brazilian peixada, and Sudanese mulukhiyah. Together with Robin Radin's beautiful photographs, these stories and recipes will inspire cooks of all levels to explore new traditions while perhaps rediscovering their own culinary roots.

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Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race Review

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(More customer reviews)Kitchen Culture in America provides a review of popular representations of food, gender and race and uses everything from television to ads and magazines to examine how women's roles have been shaped by the practice of consuming and making meals. From 1895 to 1970, this provides examples which argue that 'kitchen culture' instructs women in acceptable social behavior patterns.

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At supermarkets across the nation, customers waiting in line—mostly female—flip through magazines displayed at the checkout stand. What we find on those magazine racks are countless images of food and, in particular, women: moms preparing lunch for the team, college roommates baking together, working women whipping up a meal in under an hour, dieters happy to find a lowfat ice cream that tastes great. In everything from billboards and product packaging to cooking shows, movies, and even sex guides, food has a presence that conveys powerful gender-coded messages that shape our society.Kitchen Culture in America is a collection of essays that examine how women's roles have been shaped by the principles and practice of consuming and preparing food. Exploring popular representations of food and gender in American society from 1895 to 1970, these essays argue that kitchen culture accomplishes more than just passing down cooking skills and well-loved recipes from generation to generation. Kitchen culture instructs women about how to behave like "correctly" gendered beings. One chapter reveals how juvenile cookbooks, a popular genre for over a century, have taught boys and girls not only the basics of cooking, but also the fine distinctions between their expected roles as grown men and women. Several essays illuminate the ways in which food manufacturers have used gender imagery to define women first and foremost as consumers. Other essays, informed by current debates in the field of material culture, investigate how certain commodities like candy, which in the early twentieth century was advertised primarily as a feminine pleasure, have been culturally constructed. The book also takes a look at the complex relationships among food, gender, class, and race or ethnicity-as represented, for example, in the popular Southern black Mammy figure. In all of the essays, Kitchen Culture in America seeks to show how food serves as a marker of identity in American society.

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