dolce e salata

Marlena de Blasi is another author, which I have not heard before until I read her book, Dolce e Salata, which literally means Sweet and Salty. This memoir is about the transitional period in her life, about the move she made from Venice to a village in Tuscany. This book is a sequel to her book, Thousand Days in Venice, where she describes her journey in meeting the love of her live, Fernando, in Venice. I probably should have read that one before Dolce e Salata.

Dolce e Salata is a book about her day-to-day life in this Tuscan village, about the new friends she made, about her new relationship with Fernando, about the food she ate in her local eatery, about the food she cooked in her new oven, basically about Tuscan life. Some part are quite sweet, and some are quite savoury, but for the most part, it was a bit bland. There's no up and down to the story, just a leisurely pace from beginning to end.

Less than two hours have passed and, drenched in sweat and rouged in grape juice, I am febrile, weak as a babe as I step out from the humid enclosure of the vines and into the light of the fiendish sun. It is the first collective rest of the morning and I can't remember if I've ever been this tired. My legs feel just-foaled, not quite able to hold me as I try to stand. My body is seared but somehow exquisitely exalted and the all-absorbing sensation is not unlike a post-coital one. I look about for Fernando, who must be on the other side of the hill that separates the two fields. There he is, waving me toward him. Because they're so beautiful, I can't resist limping among the vines rather than along the sandy path beside them. Here and there among the green, succulent leaves, one or two are tarnished gold by the sun, crisped and beginning to curl. A symptom of autumn.

climbing the mango trees

Madhur Jaffrey is an Indian actress, who is also a TV cook and a food writer. I have never heard of her before I read her memoir Climbing the Mango Trees.

The book is a recollection of her younger days in India, concentrating on the history and the legends of her family.


She is a self-confessed history buff, so I totally understand why her memoir is like a history lesson more than anything. At times, she would give out a small insight into the dynamic of her large extended family, but she would never fully explain it and never fully resolve it. It's as if she's writing this book for herself, as a means of having her family history in print, or maybe it's because she's afraid of offending too many people in her family. She's almost obsessive in getting people's relation to her family right. There were numerous instances where she would explain that such and such person is her father's youngest sister, or such and such is her aunt's oldest son. It just gets a bit tedious sometimes.

When she wrote about food, it's almost like a list. Nothing to invoke a vivid image in my head. I don't know what her other books are like, but this one left me quite frustrated. Here's an excerpt.

I was very curious to see what those around me were being served. Some children had sandwiches. Tomato and cheese was popular, as was the spiced egg sandwich. Some children had leftover roasts from the night before. On Anglo-Indian girl with thin brown hair who sat at the bench next to me always startled me with unusual combinations. I remember looking over once and seeing the following on her plate: at nine o'clock there were cornflakes; at twelve o'clock there was plain rice; at three o'clock there was cooked masoor dal flowing slightly into the rice; and at six o'clock there was an English sausage. She ate all this with a fork and spoon.

kitchen confidential

Happy New Year everyone! Hope your Christmas was jolly and that there weren't too many gifts you want to return.

To start off the year 2011 with a laugh, I want to make my first post this year about this funny, and sometime crass, book by Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential is different to the previous books I have blogged about, in that, Bourdain focused more on his adult years as a chef in America, rather than his childhood memories. In the book, he utilised terms that only chefs or cooking-enthusiast would understand. I suspect that it's not because he's showing off, but because that is a part of his vocabulary, his day-to-day speech. Words like garde-manger, mise-en-place, waitron, livornaise, petit pois, which he attempted to explain towards the end of the book. He made oddly honest confessions about his drug-taking habit and he had a wicked sense humour, which I love. Nothing better than a book that can make me laugh.

Although, there is one thing that bothers me about the book and that's its disjointedness. There isn't a chronological flow to the book, the story jumps from one place in time to another unrelated one, then on to another one, this I find very distracting.


The following excerpt is one of his funnier ones.

I was, I'm telling you for the record, unqualified for the job. I was in deep waters and fast-flowing ones at that. The currents could change at any time, without warning. One day, I attended a chef's committee meeting on the East Side and returned to find the whole menu had been changed back into Italian! This included the listings on the computer, so that when I expedited that evening, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to read off items in Italian, translate them into English in my head, and call them out to my Ecuadorian crew in Spanish. I had to learn some fast mnemonic tricks to keep up, like: 'I want to Lambada - just for the Halibut," so that I would remember that lambatini was Italian for halibut, or 'I fucka you in the liver' to recall that 'fegato' meant liver.

toast & tender at the bone

I love food, I love books and I love books about food. The public library is a frequent hangout of mine. The good thing about the WA public library is that you can borrow books from all over the state, so it doesn't matter when my suburb's public library doesn't have a copy of a book I want, they'll get it from another public library in the state.

I have always been an average writer, which is why I'm always envious of people who can write beautifully. I wanted to share with you two of the books from these talented authors and hopefully they can inspire you as they have inspired me.

Toast by Nigel Slater is a book about the author's childhood food memories in 1960's Britain. There are a lot of references there that I didn't quite understand, but that's when google came in handy. The book is not all about food, bits of it are actually a bit risqué. Here are two separate paragraphs taken from the book.