Subscribe For Free Updates!

We'll not spam mate! We promise.

Monday, March 9, 2020

You Should Read This Memoir About Motherhood and the Restaurant Industry

Everything Is Under Control

From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on March 7, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.


This week I want to shout out a memoir I breezed through last month called Everything Is Under Control, by Phyllis Grant. So many people send books to my office and I barely look at 95 percent of them, so I’m not sure what convinced me to open this memoir (a genre that I don’t gravitate toward) by someone I’ve never heard of. But I did open it, and the random page I turned to sucked me in: “I know I’m pregnant again when I find myself in the anchovy aisle, tracing my fingers along the tins, my mouth watering, my skin tingling, my body overly alive.”

Another random page: “The industrial kitchen fan pumps a mash-up of lunch fumes out into the alley. I want my hair to smell like chocolate and garlic and fish. I want to lean in and carefully place the roasted beets next to the potato puree. I want a purpose.”

I won’t quote the line that so perfectly evokes the smells of new motherhood, but trust me, it’s inspired.

The book is a series of vignettes, poetic and spare and powerful, that trace this writer’s life as a chef, a baker, a mother, a partner. I have never been a chef, so I found her passages from that period of her life compelling, but I especially appreciate her portrait of motherhood, including postpartum depression, the specific pain of childbirth, and getting an abortion as a mother of two. And yet it’s not a downer at all. Check it out when it’s released next month, and let me know what you think.


On Eater

Clockwise, from top left: Chicken yassa with plantains, Moroccan salmon with jollof fonio, fufu with peanut sauce; all sit in white bowls over a yellow tablecloth Alex Staniloff/Eater
Clockwise, from top left: Chicken yassa with plantains, Moroccan salmon with jollof fonio, fufu with peanut sauce
A waffle with a dollop of maple butter and swirl of maple syrup sits on a white plate. It’s browned with caramelization and somewhat misshapen. Dina Avila / EPDX
Babka waffles at Ava Gene’s

Off Eater

  • I know there is a more depressing thing out there than pre-made collage kits but I can’t think of it right now. Also I have to say, one of the many blessings of reading the paper in print every day is seeing the print versus online headlines. In this case, the print hed was “Where’s My Imagination? Oh, Right, I Bought It.” [NYT]
  • How to turn your bedroom into a minimalist cocoon [Curbed]
  • Everyone is irrationally panic shopping and it’s at once horrifying and amusing. [TNY]
  • Why wine is so hard to understand. [Vox]
  • When did pepper mills, a signal of sophistication, became passé? [Taste]


from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3aAmIYa

Socializer Widget By Blogger Yard
SOCIALIZE IT →
FOLLOW US →
SHARE IT →

0 comments:

Post a Comment