A
Genre: Memoir, Cookbook, Nonfiction
Voracious is a lovely book that can be read in many ways – as a cookbook, as a memoir, as a coming of age story, as a love letter to New York City, and as literary criticism. Above all, it’s a book about how books and food become part of our emotional life.
Cara Nicoletti was an English Lit major in college and went on to be a chef, a butcher, and the writer of the blog Yummy Books. She brings food and reading together in a unique and powerful way. It’s a very sensual book, not just in the writing but also in the watercolor illustrations by Marion Bolognesi. I even like the feel of the book. The hardback is a very nice quality with lovely thick paper. It may seem strange to devote review space to the quality of the paper, but it seemed fitting to me that a book about how words, food, and emotion come together should also be lovely to look at and to touch.
The book is made of a series of essays. Each essay pairs an experience or a moment in the author’s life with a book tied to that moment and a recipe tied to that book. One reason it works so well is that it’s approachable – the author writes in first person and it’s all connected to her emotional life, so the book feels personal and chatty. But it’s also intellectual – she talks not just about what food is in what book, but why it is there. For instance, there’s a great discussion of a scene in Anna Karenina in which Lenin and Oblansky go to dinner in which their characters are established by what they order and how they eat it.
Some of book is sad. The chapter on Salted Caramels from Anne of Green Gables is a beautiful meditation on grief. Some is very funny. I’m especially fond of the chapter on The Dog Star. In this essay Nicoletti describes her confusion when a guy she has a crush on raves about The Road: “The Road is full of adventure and friendship and humor. It changed my entire view of what it means to be a man.” Nicoletti is utterly horrified by The Road, which is a terribly depressing post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. Not until Cara visits her crush’s apartment does she realize that the guy actually meant On the Road, by Jack Kerouac:
While I can chalk up forgetting the name of your favorite novel to first-date jitters, allowing Jack Kerouac to define for you what it means to be a man is, for me, an issue. That dinner was our last.
In case you’re wondering how The Dog Stars figures into this, Nicoletti eventually dares to try another post-apocalyptic novel, The Dog Stars, and she loves it so much that she gives us a recipe for whole roasted trout in its honor.
The book is divided into roughly linear sections. In “Childhood,” among other things, we learn that you really should never give a mouse a cookie, even if you loved the book when you were a kid and you are now a college student in a shitty New York apartment and you are super lonely and you see one little mouse and you think maybe it could be your friend – no, just no. As you’ll gather, the times frames are loose enough that Nicoletti can talk about how reading something as a child affected her as an adult.
Part Two is “Adolescence and College Years.” Romance fans will be pleased to know that, in honor of Pride and Prejudice, there’s a recipe for White Soup, and Hannibal fans will rejoice in the recipe for Crostini with Fava Beans and Liver Mousses (chicken livers). In “Adulthood,” Nicoletti writes about how baking and eating Chocolate-Covered Digestive Biscuits from the book “In the Woods” helps her cope with news of the Boston Marathon Bombing and baking helps her deal with her fear of the incoming Hurricane Sandy.
I can’t vouch for this book as a cookbook, because I haven’t tried following any of the recipes myself. They are varied, of course, because they follow literary themes as opposed to be broken down by dessert, entree, etc. Many of them seem pretty complex to me, too – not the kinds of things you would throw together on a weeknight. But there are some simple recipes, like the one for Soft-Boiled Eggs inspired by Emma, and the Hot Cheese Sandwich from American Pastoral.
My lack of cooking aside, I loved this book in terms of literary criticism – it absolutely helped me look at food and literature in a new light. Nicoletti does a great job of showing how food can illuminate culture, theme, and character. It also works as a slice of life memoir – each chapter is a tiny snapshot of a woman’s life. There are so many beautiful moments – the first time she eats a real currant bun (fans of The Secret Garden will understand the significance of the moment), her childhood realization that she is living across the street from the former home of a famous woman poet (Sylvia Plath!), her description of how New Yorkers find ways to enjoy the spring outdoors:
We can make anything into our own outdoor living space-we sunbathe on the melty tar roofs that our landlords have explicitly banned us from, stretch out and read on rusty fire escapes that haven’t been inspected since the 1970’s, place seat cushions on cement stoops, and line the sidewalks with lawn chairs. We lay towels over goose poop and sidestep shards of broken glass in public parks, from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we ooh and aah with jealousy about people who have actual “backyards,” which are almost always private alleyways where we pack ourselves in, shoulder to shoulder, over tiny Weber grills and think, “This is living.”
Above all, this book gave me great pleasure because the writing is lovely, and it gave me pleasure because it lovingly described things I also love (books and food). It describes food without boundary or pretension – she talks about eating slices of mango from a truck in the park as fondly as she talks about wine-braised leg of lamb with wild mushrooms. A book about life should make me interested in a person and what happens to them. A book about books should make me excited about reading, and should help me look at books in a new way. A book about food should, above all, make me very hungry. This book ties all these things together seamlessly. It was a joy to read.
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Great review! Thanks for letting us know about this book. It sounds right up my alley since I’ve always been captivated by food descriptions in books. Sometimes the food is what I remember best from books. The Paddington stories always make me think of cream cakes and chicken and dumplings. And while I didn’t end up liking marmalade much, that bear made it sound soooo delicious. I will have to check this one out.
Now dying to read this book, thanks for the review. Equally overcome with longing to recreate Levin and Stiva’s dinner.
For me the big childhood book/ food disappointment was Turkish Delight. It still doesn’t make sense to me how awful it is.
Turkish Delight! I had to google this to find out it was the “jelly candy” that was always included in the box of homemade candies my husband’s aunt gave everyone. She loved to cook and make homemade marshmallows, soft toffee, “jelly candy”, chocolate covered bonbons, candied orange peel and so much more. She also make gooseberry jam which had the most awful color (kind of brownish green) but a great tart sweet flavor. I’ve tried to carry on but can’t match the sheer number of different sweets she included in her boxes–not to mention mincemeat–with actual MEAT.
I’m 2/3rds through this book and I’m really enjoying it. I’m reading it very slowly, but it makes me want to read pretty much every book she talks about, because her relationship with each book rings so true. I’m not vegetarian, though I don’t eat some meats, and her relationship with meat as a butcher and a cook is interesting to me.