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Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

Food Writing

Home Cooking

by Laurie Colwin

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Quick take

A sumptuous ode to the pleasures of good food and good company—this modern classic is part memoir and part cookbook.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Light_Read

    Light read

  • Illustrated icon, Female_Friendship

    Female friendships

  • Illustrated icon, LOL

    LOL

  • Illustrated icon, Foodie

    Foodie

Synopsis

Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, Laurie Colwin delivers a beloved cookbook 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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Home Cooking

Starting Out in the Kitchen

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing and some learn from books.

The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone’s knee. Years ago a child (usually a girl) would learn from her parent (usually her mother) by standing on a chair next to the stove and watching intently, or by wandering into the kitchen and begging to help. I was once given an amazing lunch by a young woman whose mother had been unable to boil water but was quite able to employ expensive Chinese help. Everyone should have the good fortune either to be Chinese or to be rich. Either way, you can end up learning how to make homemade won tons and duck stuffed with cherries and fresh lichee nuts.

For those who come to cooking late in life—by this I mean after the age of eighteen—many are the pitfalls in store. For instance, if you ask an experienced cook what dish is foolproof, scrambled eggs is often the answer. But the way toward perfect scrambled eggs is full of lumps. It is no easy thing to make perfect scrambled eggs, although almost anyone can turn out fairly decent ones, and with a little work, really disgusting ones can be provided.

I was once romantically aligned with a young man who I now realize was crazy, but at the time he seemed . . . romantic. It was on the subject of scrambled eggs that I began to have my first suspicions. He claimed his scrambled eggs resembled one of those asbestos mats you put over the burner to diffuse the flame. I asked him what his method of making them was.

“Well,” he said, “I mash them together—you know what I mean—and then I add whatever spice is around.”

I asked him what was usually around. Mace, he said, and ground thyme. He produced two very old-looking tins. I did not understand why a person would want to have mace in his eggs or ground thyme, which tastes like a kind of bitter, powdered sawdust and is not good for anything unless you need weird green powder for a prop. Well, then what? I wanted to know.

“I heat up a little vegetable oil in a pan and go and take a shower. When I come back, I put in the eggs and then I go and shave. By the time I’m finished shaving, they’re done.”

This should have been enough to make me flee, but love, aside from being blind, is also often deaf.

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Why I love it

One of the best parts of being on Book of the Month’s Editorial Team is sharing with you, our members, a book or author you might not have encountered before. While we usually give this to you in the form of the best new releases, every once in a while, something different sneaks up on us. Next in our series from the late Laurie Colwin, an under-the-radar talent we’re shining a brand new spotlight on, is Home Cooking.

Using a powerful and unique voice to highlight the minutiae of domestic life, Colwin wrote a variety of fiction and nonfiction until her unexpected death in 1992. Her work is character-driven but never boring—each page is steeped in drama, humor, and sheer life. While Colwin wrote in and about a time decades ago, her singular ability to capture the human experience makes her work timeless. Book of the Month believes that Laurie Colwin still has a story to tell a new generation of readers, and so we wanted to give our members a chance to step into her quirky, relatable world.

Book of the Month has selected three books that capture the essence of Colwin’s talent. Home Cooking is the last book of Laurie’s we are featuring. A collection of recipes and essays that recount both hilarious and poignant anecdotes from Laurie’s kitchen, Home Cooking comes together as a sort of memoir of an incredible storyteller.

Other books by Laurie Colwin

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