Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food

by Ann Hood

Overview

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood “connects food with memory in delicious ways” (Jane Ciabattari, BBC).

From her Italian-American childhood, through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of good food. In Kitchen Yarns, pairing her signature humor and tenderness with simple, comforting recipes, Hood spins tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393249514
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	241,846
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of a dozen books of memoir and fiction, including the novels The Stolen Child, The Book That Matters Most, and The Knitting Circle, and editor of the anthologies Knitting Yarns and Knitting Pearls. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction xiii

The Golden Silver Palate 1

Recipe: Chicken Marbella 7

The Best Fried Chicken 11

Recipe: Indiana Fried Chicken 18

Pie Lady 21

Recipe: Gogo's Lemon Meringue Pie 26

Gogo's Meatballs 28

Recipe: Gogo's Meatballs 30

Love, Lunch, and Meatball Grinders 33

Recipe: Gogo's Meatball Grinders 36

Fancy Food 38

Recipe: Fancy-Lady Sandwiches 44

Recipe: Gogo's Chicken Salad 45

Recipe: Gogo's Ham Salad 46

Recipe: Glamourous Curried Chicken Salad 47

Recipe: Chicken Salad Veronique 48

Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl 50

Recipe: Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins 57

My Father's Pantry 59

Recipe: Baked Macaroni à la Poops 67

Carbonara Quest 70

Recipe: My Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara 74

Recipe: Pasta Amatriciana 77

Sausage on Wheels 79

Recipe: Gloria and Hood's Sausage and Peppers 82

Dinner for One 84

Recipe: Pork Roast with Garlic 90

Recipe: NoHo Pork Enchiladas 91

Recipe: NoHo Chicken Enchiladas 93

Party Like It's 1959 95

Recipe: Michael's Whiskey Sours 101

Recipe: Dinner-Party Cherries Jubilee 103

Soft Food 104

Recipe: French Scrambled Eggs 109

Recipe: Never-Fail Soufflé 111

Recipe: Central Mexican Guacamole 114

One Potato, Two 116

Recipe: Sam's Potatoes 120

Recipe: Grace's Cheesy Potatoes 121

Allure 123

Recipe: Mary's Peach Pie 127

How to Butcher a Pig 129

Recipe: Matt Gennuso's Cassoulet 134

Risi e Bisi 138

Recipe: Annabelle's Risi e Bisi 143

Five Ways of Looking at the Tomato 145

Recipe: Gogo's Sauce 151

Recipe: Matt's Pasta with Tomatoes and Brie 153

Recipe: Better Than a Restaurant Caprese Salad 154

Recipe: Jill's Tenderloin and Roasted Tomatoes 156

Recipe: Kirsty Work's Bloody Mary Tomatoes 158

How to Smoke Salmon 159

Recipe: Smoked Salmon Inspired by Mark and Heather 164

The Summer of Omelets 166

Recipe: The Perfect Omelet 170

IKEA Life 172

Recipe: Gogo's Swedish Meatballs with IKEA Gravy 182

How to Cook Fish When You Really, Really Do Not Like Fish 185

Recipe: Cousin Chippy's Swordfish Oreganato 188

Recipe: Green Herb Sauce 190

Three Potato 192

Recipe: Michael's Baked Potatoes 195

With Thanks to the Chicken 197

Recipe: My Roast Chicken 201

Recipe: Michael's Overnight Chicken Stock 202

Recipe: Tortellini en Brodo 203

Let Us Now Praise the English Muffin 204

Recipe: Italian Beef Stew 207

Comfort Food II 210

Recipe: Perfect Instant Ramen 214

Recipe: Perfect Grilled Cheese 215

Tomato Pie 217

Recipe: Laurie Colwin's Tomato Pie 227

Acknowledgments 231

Editorial Reviews

★ Winter 2018

Novelist Hood (The Book That Matters Most) recounts the events of her life in a series of autobiographical essays that center on the foods she loves and craves and the dishes that have helped her through hardship. The author grew up in Providence, RI, in an Italian American family, where her grandmother cooked gallons of red sauce every week, and her mother crafted delicious meatballs and "fancy lady sandwiches" that Hood took to school functions. Hood details her teenage years working for the department store Jordan Marsh and subsequent 15 years as a TWA flight attendant. As her travels allowed her to explore more sophisticated foods around the world, it was the simple dishes from her childhood (e.g., her father's Indiana fried chicken made from three simple ingredients: flour, salt, and pepper) to which she always returned. Hood writes movingly about her failed marriage, the tragic deaths of her father, brother, and five-year-old daughter, and the recipes that kept her going through these difficult periods. VERDICT This warm, humorous, touching, and wonderfully readable book will appeal to food lovers and fans of culinary biographies.—Phillip Oliver, formerly with Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Library Journal

Hood's essays are like hot chocolate, cozy and warm. Her collection of meditations on food and life touches the big themes: grief for a brother and a small child gone suddenly, two divorces and the end of a grand affair. Still, Hood describes them with the easy intimacy of a friend, confessing her foibles as she stirs a pot of red sauce. The recipes closing each chapter hint that every heartache can be soothed by the deft application of cheese and carbohydrates.

The New York Times Book Review - Irina Dumitrescu

08/13/2018
In this moving collection of essays, Hood (The Knitting Circle), now in her 60s, looks back on her life through the lens of her love of food and cooking. Hood grew up in Providence, R.I., in an Italian-American family that loved food, with her grandmother doing the cooking. Hood’s father, who was in the Navy, loved to cook but his rather pedestrian repertoire ranged from runny mashed potatoes to lopsided cake; her mother, who worked for a time in a candy factory, was more adept in the kitchen, making elegant “fancy lady” sandwiches and pies (her lemon meringue pie and meatball recipes are among the many included here). The essays reference major life events, revealing how preparing food helped Hood deal with the death of her older brother and the death of her five-year-old daughter from virulent form of strep (“Now I was cooking to keep from losing my mind from grief,” she says while making pork roast with garlic). Cooking also inspired such happy memories as baking with her children or preparing meals for friends. Hood covers her teens as a department store Jordan Marsh girl, her early adulthood as a TWA flight attendant, motherhood, and her recent marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman. Hood’s sharp essays emphasize food as emotional nourishment, bringing family and friends together—both to celebrate the joys and to heal the wounds of life. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ann Hood is a gifted storyteller.… [Kitchen Yarns is] perfect holiday season fare, but be forewarned: You’ll want to keep both kitchen and Kleenex close at hand."

People

"In this cozy read, Hood shares recipes that shaped her...and the poignant life lessons about loss, love, and friendship she learned in the kitchen."

Real Simple

"[Hood] never pulls back from writing with searing honesty—even about painful topics."

Cape Cod Times - Laurie Higgins

"Eminently readable, Kitchen Yarns, Ann Hood’s tender, witty, and funny voyage through a life of food, reminds us that the visceral taste memories of our past are essential benchmarks of our life, and that the stories of a family are always best felt and expressed through those dishes."

Jacques Pépin

"A feast for the heart, mind and senses."

USA Today

"These tales of ingredients, recipes and meals will lift your spirits."

Bethanne Patrick

"Ann Hood is a gifted storyteller... [Kitchen Yarns is] perfect holiday season fare, but be forewarned: You'll want to keep both kitchen and Kleenex close at hand."

People - Book of the Week

"From the first page to the last, readers know they are in the hands of a master storyteller.… Full of humor and love, overflowing with heart and life, Kitchen Yarns is a beautiful read."

Book Reporter

"In this cozy read, Hood shares recipes that shaped her… and the poignant life lessons about loss, love, and friendship she learned in the kitchen."

Real Simple - Nora Horvath

"Hood’s essays are like hot chocolate, cozy and warm. Her collection of meditations on food and life touches the big themes."

Irina Dumitrescus’ Choice - New York Times Book Review

"At the end of Kitchen Yarns, you may empathize with Hood’s sadness, but you will not be disheartened. You will just want to rinse out the pan and start over."

Providence Journal - Betty J. Cotter

"A must-give book for any cooks in your life.… A charming and heartfelt collection of personal essays, all centered on the thread of food."

South Coast Today - Lauren Daley

"Hood connects food with memory in delicious ways."

BBC

"Hood’s essays are like hot chocolate, cozy and warm. Her collection of meditations on food and life touches the big themes."

Editors’ Choice - New York Times Book Review - Irina Dumitrescu

2018-09-12

In this culinary confessional from the acclaimed author, it's less about the kitchen and more about the yarns.

Writing a compelling food memoir is a delicate act; the recipes have to live up to the memories they evoke. In the hands of prolific author Hood (Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, 2017, etc.), the stories themselves are the main dish—but the food still has to be delicious. "I grew up eating. A lot," she writes at the beginning. "As the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher said, ‘First we eat, then we do everything else.' That describes my childhood home." From the kitchen of her Italian grandmother Gogo through her career as a flight attendant, a seemingly perfect American suburban existence, the death of a child, divorce, and fairy tale-like second chance at true romance, Hood recalls each moment through the meals she was preparing, recipes both great and, well, not-so-great. The good ones include her family's traditional meatballs: "The secret to [the] meatballs is how you roll them, a skill my father could never master. Neither could I." The bad ones include her father's scrambled eggs made with sugar. Then there are the heartbreaking ones: the "doctored" ramen Hood makes on the anniversary of her 5-year-old daughter Gracie's death (which she movingly chronicled in her 2008 book, Comfort). "It still hits me when I see seckel pears in the grocery store," she writes. "Little blonde girls in glasses. Hear the Beatles singing ‘Eight Days a Week.' The sharp stab of a memory rises to the surface out of nowhere." But her ramen, featuring a poached egg, butter, and American cheese, helps. While some of the stories feel redundant, with repeated bits of history rephrased, when Hood is focused on her prose, it's like a classic recipe—all the flavors sing.

A full plate of heart and hearty eats.

Kirkus Reviews