Down the Kitchen Sink Review

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(More customer reviews)I am a great fan of Beverly Nichols, so I am always excited to see one of his books reprinted. I enjoyed this look into an era long gone. His gardening books gave you a glimpse of Gaskin but this book presented a picture of the real person, not just the perfect servant. I like Nichols' wry humour and every cat lover will feel they have met a kindred spirit.

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Down the Kitchen Sink has much in common with its famous predecessor, Down the Garden Path, in which Beverley Nichols described his early forays into the realm of gardening. When he began to write the first, he could not prune a rose. When he began to write the second, he could not boil an egg. Perhaps this is why both books remain fresh and eminently readable. The phrase 'kitchen sink' may suggest squalor and disillusionment, but Beverley Nichols transforms it into a symbol of merriment and adventure. With a new foreword by Roy Dicks and Val Biro's charming drawings, the Timber Press edition of Down the Kitchen Sink deservedly takes its place among Beverley's classics on gardens, homes, cats, and other friends.

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Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (Vintage Contemporaries) Review

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(More customer reviews)A talented and extraordinarily accessible writer, Laurie Colwin died unexpectedly at the age of forty-eight in October 1992. In "Home Cooking," as in her other books, Colwin's writing charmingly combines an easy, conversational style, an innate curiosity and a good-natured disrespect for things fancy. She was a decidedly unstuffy columnist for GOURMET magazine for some years, giving the magazine a needed breath of fresh air.
If you have not already partaken of the pleasures of reading Colwin's work, I urge you to buy a copy of "Home Cooking." Colwin is insouciant, opinionated and very funny. My favorite chapter in "Home Cooking" is entitled "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir". It begins:
"There is something triumphant about a really disgusting meal. It lingers in the memory with a lurid glow, just as something exalted is remembered with a kind of mellow brilliance...I am thinking about meals that are positively loathsome from soup to nuts, although one is not usually fortunate enough to get either soup or nuts."
With great relish, Colwin describes several perfectly horrid meals, the most striking of which is a variation of the medieval starry gazey pie, "in which the crust is slit so that the whole baked eels within can poke their nasty little heads out and look at the piecrust stars with which the top is supposed to be festooned."
The recipes in "Home Cooking" seem almost like afterthoughts to her meanderings on entertaining, home and hearth, and disguising vegetables, but they are mostly very good and always very simple. Colwin's gingerbread recipe is particularly delicious, and will make your house smell like a Christmas party. Highly recommended both as a cozy read and as a source of reliable recipes. We lost her too young, but Laurie Colwin lives on in "Home Cooking" and her other fine books.

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Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, Home Cooking is Laurie Colwin's manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. From the humble hotplate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Hilarious, personal, and full of Colwin's hard-won expertise, Home Cooking will speak to the heart of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.

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