Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is rich, part memoir, part cookbook, part travelogue, it is the story of Donia Bijan's journey from emigre to restaurateur, sincere and beautifully written. Her stories are similar to the stories I heard as a student at UCLA from Persian students and their parents who had to start again in a new country. She draws interesting pictures of her family, especially her parents, their marriage and life through good and bad times. Her collection of memories is sad, sweet, tart and as delicious as the mouth-watering recipes she includes. Her training at the Cordon Bleu is a rare look into the school's rigorous (and dangerous) training method in its final year with Madame Brassart, Julia Child's nemesis. This is a story about the things that appeal to all of us, travel, good food and love of family. It is a warm and lovely look at her life, the love she felt for her mother, and her ability to find a way to get what she wants out of life. Maman's Homesick Pie is not to be missed!

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For Donia Bijan's family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when the Islamic revolution in Iran threatened their safety, they fled to California's Bay Area, where the familiar flavors of Bijan's mother's cooking formed a bridge to the life they left behind. Now, through the prism of food, award-winning chef Donia Bijan unwinds her own story, finding that at the heart of it all is her mother, whose love and support enabled Bijan to realize her dreams.From the Persian world of her youth to the American life she embraced as a teenager to her years at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (studying under the infamous Madame Brassart) to apprenticeships in France's three-star kitchens and finally back to San Francisco, where she opened her own celebrated bistro, Bijan evokes a vibrant kaleidoscope of cultures and cuisines. And she shares thirty inspired recipes from her childhood (Saffron Yogurt Rice with Chicken and Eggplant and Orange Cardamom Cookies), her French training (Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread and Purple Plum Skillet Tart), and her cooking career (Roast Duck Legs with Dates and Warm Lentil Salad and Rose Petal Ice Cream).An exhilarating, heartfelt memoir, Maman's Homesick Pie is also a reminder of the women who encourage us to shine.

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A Fugue in Hell's Kitchen: A Katy Green Mystery Review

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(More customer reviews)In 1939 swing violinist Katy Green is as usual unemployed and walking the pavement (and clubs) for a job. Though she would prefer to say no to her pal cellist Amalia "Am" Lee Chen's request for help, a gig is a gig, but Katy would have preferred a musical job. Instead Am asks Katy to find a priceless Paganini manuscript stolen from her cello case following a performance performed at the prestigious Meyers Conservatory.
Though Katy agrees, she finds the recent death of the conservatory's dean, Iris Meyers a bit more interesting. Katy notices the high note of the tension amidst the faculty reaching discord that along with the disastrous efforts of the deceased's successor, her brother Joseph, threatens the school's existence. .A forgery of the missing composition is returned to Am that leads to the police arresting her for stealing the manuscript. Now the case is personal as Katy follows the musical notes to Harlem trying to find the purloined item even as the conservatory's librarian, know it all, Nina Rovere is killed
Hal Glazer hits all the high notes with this delightful historical cozy that pays homage to various musical styles like swing. Katy is a wonderful lead performer who keeps the tale humming as she digs the scene in an attempt to prove that the arrest of Am is racial due to the imminent war and her friend being of Asiatic descent. Fans of historical who-done-its starring a wonderful amateur sleuth working the mean streets of the Manhattan club scene will sing in harmony with FUGUE IN HELL'S KITCHEN and want to resonate about Katy's previous number, TOO DEAD TO SWING.
Harriet Klausner

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Rare manuscript theft, forgery, crooked land developers, the gangs of New York and a Chinese cellist in 1939 New York City!Swing musician Katy Green agrees to help a friend, a music conservatory teacher in New York's roughest neighborhood, hunt for a stolen music manuscript. This rare and valuable autograph manuscript--perhaps a forgery-- of a Paganini guitar quartet has inexplicably vanished. What Katy first thinks will be the easy pursuit of a petty thief swiftly turns into a deadly fugue of greed, jealousy, and zealotry, and a fight for her life. Her fight to keep a Chinese cellist friend from being deported evokes 2003, but Katy's in New York in 1939, before the Empire State Building has enough tenants, before all the subways have been built, when Hell's Kitchen gangs shoot homemade linoleum knives at people.

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The Kitchen Book & The Cook Book Review

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(More customer reviews)This volume consists of two works originally published by Freeling in the 1970s, "The Kitchen Book," and "The Cook Book." The two are presented here one after the other as separate entities, together with whimsical illustrations by John Lawrence. At the back of the book is an index covering material in "The Cook Book".
"The Kitchen Book" describes Freeling's formative years as a cook in the 1950s and 60s. Freeling came of age in Britain at the close of World War II. He wanted to become a chef, and set off to the continent to find himself a job in a the restaurant of a fancy Parisian hotel. Determination and perseverance enabled him to withstand the rigors of an informal apprenticeship in the kitchen, where he learned the foundation of French cooking. Ambition and a desire for more pay led him to take a position in a provincial hotel, where he learned more, and not necessarily just about food. Much of the more interesting material in this volume covers this period in his life. The remainder covers his later cooking career, when he shifted from hotel to hotel in Britain, and presided as executive chef over a restaurant that was doomed from the start by fantastically poor management. Some of the material in the latter part of this volume can be slightly hard to follow for readers unfamiliar with the context of restaurant work in Britain or British dialects and slang.
"The Cook Book" is a written in a very informal narrative style, quite different from the detailed didactic instructions of more typical cookbooks. Freeling enumerates the merits of a dish and how and when it may best be enjoyed, and then narrates entirely in prose how the dish can be prepared. He eschews exact measurements, temperature or timing guidelines, since he knows that ingredients are variable, and will cook differently depending on their age and treatment, and the humidity and temperature of the kitchen. He notes that it is far more important to observe, taste, smell, and touch the food as it cooks than to rely on measurements of volume, temperature, or time.
Indeed, in the introduction to "The Kitchen Book," Freeling explains some of his philosophy on the subject, emphasizing that a good cook makes a dish well not through slavishly following a recipe, but through shear practice, and continuing to make the same dish repeatedly until it consistently comes out right. He tell us "In this book are no recipes, absolutely no useful hints, and above all no damned instructions; they do not give one an appetite." Actually, that's not quite true-a careful reader can pick up a number of great hints by reading the book, starting with the idea that good cooking comes through practice, not instructions. Nevertheless, Freeling's narrative style for giving recipes in "The Cook Book" is not for everyone. It works well for experienced cooks who are familiar with the ingredients mentioned. Such cooks won't have a problem with statements like "cook until done," but the rest of us may wistfully wish for a few more specific guidelines to help us along. But this doesn't detract from the delightful readability of the recipes.


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Nicolas Freeling, best known for producing some of the finest of modern crime fiction, began his working life as an apprentice cook in a large French hotel. He continued cooking professionally for many years, and his enthusiasm for, and interest in, gastronomy in its broadest sense is at least equal to his passion for crime. Here, reprinted in a single volume, are his two splendid books of gastronomical memoir drawn from those experiences. Each is a delicious blend of the culinary and the literary, and include such recipes as cinnamon lamb stew and bouillabaisse, all charmingly floating about in a consistently entertaining text. The work is illustraited by the witty and winsome pen of John Lawerence, the perfect visual sauce for Freelin's savouries. Funny, wise, full of inspiration and delight, The Kitchen Book & The Cook Book will find a place close to every cook's hearth and heart.

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Pedant in the Kitchen Review

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(More customer reviews)Originally written as columns for the Guardian, this collection of foodie essays is by turns hilarious and instructive, as in how many hangman's nooses (one to five) to ascribe to a meal that is going bad fast while hungry guests are whooping it up in the living room, and how the relationship between professional and domestic cook is similar to a first-time sexual encounter ("No, I won't do that"). On every page I found something that made me holler "Comrade!" I have so been everywhere this guy has been in the kitchen.

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The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping? This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss.

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Kitchen Boy Review

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(More customer reviews)What a pleasure to read the book this summer while I was vacationing on Mount Desert Island. I hurried back to the bookstore to get another book by Mr. Pippen- Cheap Gossip- and was promptly informed by the cashier that he had been her High School English teacher!The book is a very "easy read" with the dryest humor. I had a similar upbringing as young An-dy in the book- working in a hotels and restaurants on Cape Cod, clamming with the parents, eating tons of fish, and waiting on the tourist population. This is surely a book that I will re-read each summer!

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a novel, the story of a Maine boy working summers in asmall coastal hotel, a story of the summer people, the hotelproprietors, and the coming of age of one smalltown maine boy in thelate 1950s early 1960s

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In the Kitchen: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Here's my dilemma. Based on In the Kitchen, Monica Ali clearly is a talented writer with an eye for detail and a rare gift for turning a phrase and expressing insights in fresh ways. At the same time, she's produced a novel that is too often a slog and painful to read. There are so many characters, it's hard to keep track of them (particularly all the kitchen staff), and few are especially likable; none are especially engaging. (In 436 pages, I didn't get emotionally involved with any of them--not even the pathetic waif the protagonist takes in or the kitchen crew whose back stories veered from the horrific to the banal.)
The plot just creeps along for 4/5 of the book, until close to the end, when the main character, Gabe, begins to self-destruct in earnest, but by then I just yawned and kept asking, "What is he doing now, and why?" Ali has a tendency to digress into lengthy philosophical discussions with little or no bearing on the plot, and then keep hammering long after her character has made his point. She has an almost obsessive fascination with detail--way, way too much detail--which bogs down the plot, such as it is. More than once I seriously considered just casting the book aside and moving on to the next one in my stack. In the end I finished it, but only just.
So my dilemma: How to rate a book that's so obviously flawed but where the author is so obviously talented? If I could give half-stars, this would probably be three and a half, if only in appreciation for Monica Ali's extraordinary way with words and her extensive knowledge of how restaurants work. I haven't read Brick Lane or seen the movie, so I can't speak to whether In the Kitchen is just a sophomore slump. But I will say that she sure could have used a better editor.

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The Summer Kitchen Review

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(More customer reviews)Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in Manhattan. Vacations mean Barbados. February is the annual clothes-shopping event in Milan. She drives a gold BMW X5.
And then her husband --- who has financed this extravagant life by bilking investors out of an estimated $12 million --- pleads guilty to wire fraud and goes to jail for a year.
That white-collar criminal's wife is a great character. Once rich, now poor. Once part of a power couple in a community where only couples count, now alone and scorned. How will she support her three young children?
But wait. That's no fictional character --- that's Karen Weinreb. How did she fix her life? She used what she'd learned studying literature and her experience at Random House, and wrote a 340-page first novel.
In the novel, Nora Banks --- Weinreb's stand-in --- is "the perfect Bedford wife and mother." High cheekbones. Long blonde hair. Glowing skin. An hourglass waist. Almond-sized diamond engagement ring. The icing? She's a gifted baker. "Much more Martha than Martha," a friend says. "You not only have a gorgeous husband --- you're not under house arrest."
But, really, at the start of the novel, Nora is shallow as glass. And, thus, not terribly likeable --- or is that just because I'm a guy who's often experienced women like her, at parties, looking over my shoulder at bigger game?
Nora is even less likeable on November 1st, when she thinks that the early morning knocking on the door means nothing more than overly zealous trick-or-treaters. Wrong. It's the FBI, come to arrest her husband.
What follows is a delicious social drama. Everyone drops Nora except for the kids' nanny, a bosomy South American saint who dispenses more wisdom than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oh, and her new friend, a sexually avaricious and larcenous lawyer who does everything but twirl his moustache. Not that she notices --- she's too busy working up a world-class hate on her husband.
If these were the only elements in "The Summer Kitchen", it would be a tawdry summer read, perfect for beaches slightly less crowded because of Bernie Madoff. Happily, Weinreb has a gift. Even better, she's savvy about people --- starting with herself.
I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I reveal there is an arc to the plot. It's a stunner: Nora realizes that her husband didn't act alone. She knew nothing of his machinations --- she wasn't his co-conspirator --- but she was the one with the hunger for things and trips and status. In his eagerness to provide all that for her, her husband --- a basically good man --- crossed the line.
The author's astonishing willingness to implicate her main character (and herself) places "The Summer Kitchen" above formulaic chick lit. Our questions thus go beyond "Will her baking business make it?" and "Will she sleep with the crooked lawyer?" to "Will she reconcile with her husband?"
I turned pages greedily, eager to find out.

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When Nora Banks goes to answer the doorbell very early one November 1st, she thinks it must be a group of teen pranksters still out trick-or-treating. But it's no prank—it's the Feds, who have come to arrest her husband Evan for a white collar crime. Nora's enviable, privileged life in the eighteenth-century house she'd quit her job to renovate to museum-quality perfection, is upended in an instant. The Bedford wives close ranks against Nora and her children. Nora's only support comes from her children's nanny Beatriz. The two women bond to raise the boys as smoothly as possible while Nora goes back to work. Baking has always been her biggest passion, so she launches a business of her own, the Summer Kitchen. Tempted by the offer of an affair with one of the local husbands and thwarted by an alpha wife who actively tries to shut down her business, Nora has to reach into reserves she didn't know she had to support her family and change her way of thinking about life, family, money, and romance.

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The Kitchen Boy : A Novel of the Last Tsar Review

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(More customer reviews)This extremely well written novel reads like a true life adventure story. It's a tale of the murder of the Russian imperial family in 1918 in their place of exile in Siberia, told by one of the people who was present at the time. The plot ranges from revolutionary times up to the present day, and involves a deep, dark mystery: why were two of the bodies never discovered? The reader is quickly drawn into the story, and the writing is such that, even though you know the terrible fate which awaits the last Tsar and his family, you keep hoping the ending will be different. There are a few twists at the end, which brings the tale to a bittersweet conclusion. Highly entertaining and sobering reading, and I recommend it very much!

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The Kitchen House: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)"The Kitchen House"
After reading "The Kitchen House" I believe that Kathleen Grissom has crafted an absorbing historical tale that probes the darkest edges in this villainous period of American history by employing an extraordinary and distinctive approach. The author cleverly created two contrasting protagonists, Lavinia, the white girl-to-woman, and Belle, the mixed race slave, to move the story alternately from their separate perspectives; Ms. Grissom guides the reader into the deepest reaches of the soul of each character in the book. For me, at least, this memorable cast of characters, from the good ones to the downright evil ones seems to have established permanent residence in my thoughts. While I agree with M. Jacobsen's comment that Belle's chapters could have been longer (I really loved Belle), I don't believe her role to be less significant than Lavinia's. Lavinia, as a white person observes and shares the slave experience from within. This approach is unique, I think. At least, I don't recall encountering the technique in literature, and I found it extremely compelling.
The actual historical events of the period are less prominent than the actions, emotions and motivations of the people who live on either side of the implied, but not to be violated, boundary between the races. I think that the complicated relationships between Lavinia and Belle, Mama, and many of the other characters, allow the reader to discover tiny, but significant, cracks in this boundary through which the plot races along from crisis to crisis and then to the shocking, yet fitting conclusion.
Ms. Grissom obviously conducted exhaustive research into the time period of the book. As a born Canadian, she must be commended. In the book she succeeded in describing the customs, mores and artifacts of this period in a clear and entertaining way. Often, when reading a novel, I tend to skip over descriptive passages so as not to interrupt plot progression and character development. In "The Kitchen House" I found the descriptions and details charming and sometimes melancholy. Who can forget, now, what a vasculum is, or forget the image of little slave children pulling the cords of the ceiling fans in the dining rooms to cool their masters on stifling summer days?
I enjoyed reading this book so much that I bought several extra copies to share a very inspiring and special reading experience with special people. So, Ms. Grissom - will we be finding out what happens to the "Kitchen House" characters in the next generation? Kathleen Grissom's powerful first novel leaves me eagerly awaiting the next, whether or not it is a sequel or a totally new historical novel from a totally different perspective.
Reviewer,
D. Eckert


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