Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen: A Memoir and Cookbook

by Laurie Colwin Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Overview

Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, the acclaimed author of Happy All the Time delivers a beloved cookbook manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. ¿ With a foreword by Ruth Reichl.

“As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking.” -The New York Times Book Review

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.

Editorial Reviews

Washington Post Book World

It is the one true kitchen friend.

New York Times Book Review

As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking.

From the Publisher

Celebrates a life devoted to food, with chapters on how to cook a meal for several hundred people, how to prepare a gourmet dinner with eggplant in your bathtub, and how to make the best fried chicken in the world.” —Santa Fe New Mexican

“The joy of reading Colwin’s food writing is that she is doing much more than teaching you how to function in front of a stove.... Her brusque kitchen style is really a sly way of urging you to trust the strength of your convictions.” —The New Yorker

“As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Everything food writing should be: funny, profound, inspiring and unaffected." —Nigella Lawson

“The one true kitchen friend." —The Washington Post

“Laurie Colwin's food thoughts are like phone calls from a dear friend.” —The New York Times
 
“A delightful tribute to food, friends and kitchen memories.... This charmer is as irresistible as homemade shortbread.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
 
“A very funny book. Funny enough to make you giggle out loud.” —Newsday

“[Laurie Colwin] is a home cook, like you and me, whose charm and lack of pretension make her wonderfully human and a welcome companion.” —Chicago Tribune

“I decided to lean back and trust Ms. Colwin when she revealed that ‘I am never on a diet regime I cannot be talked out of.’” —Ann Banks, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Delightful. . . . [Colwin] is funny, and for some reason funny stories about food are as funny as things can get.” —St. Petersburg Times
 
“Cozy, unpretentious good sense ... characterizes all her food writing.” —The New York Times

“I have in my kitchen a book called Home Cooking. And, in between following the recipes for Extremely Easy Beef Stew, or Estelle Colwin Snellenberg’s Potato Pancakes, I would frequently sit down on a little stool in my kitchen and read through one of the essays in that book. I never read through The Joy of Cooking, and I can read the Silver Palate Cookbook standing up, but I always sat down to read these.” —Anna Quindlen
 
“Laurie Colwin is both sensible and sensitive when writing about food, and [her] prose makes me laugh, cry and feel hungry all at the same time.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Reading the essays of Laurie Colwin is a bit like eating comfort food: warm, familiar and good for the soul.” —Hartford Courant

“A warm, personal remembrance of the foods Colwin ate as a child and later served to friends and family.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
 
“[Colwin] is a beacon of hope. For beginning cooks, Home Cooking is a grand consciousness and/or confidence-raiser.” —The Oregonian

“Like a classic dish, [Colwin’s] writing is magic in its simplicity.” —Charlotte Observer

“Wry and funny.” —Dallas Morning News

“Charming and humorous.” —USA Today

“Enthralling, but all too short. The only thing to do [is] reread it. And then turn to her novels.” —Buffalo News

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175632010
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Old-Fashioned Steamed Chocolate Pudding

1. Melt 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate. Let cool.

2. Sift 1/2 cup of sugar.

3. Beat one egg until light. Add the sugar to it gradually and beat until creamy.

4. Add melted chocolate and then add 1 tablespoon melted, cooled butter.

5. Sift 1 cup of all-purpose flour. Resift with 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Add to the egg mixture in three parts, alternating the thirds with 1/2 cup of milk in three parts. Beat until smooth after each addition.

6. Pour into a buttered pudding mold. Cover with waxed paper tied down with a rubber band and steam in a kettle for one hour.

This pudding tips nicely out of its mold and looks like a baked hat. It is delicious with a raspberry puree, or with whipped cream. Some people like it sliced with a little jam. Steamed puddings have a wonderful satiny texture: half a pudding, half a cake and the nicer half of each.

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