Book Thoughts: The Secret of Cooking by Bee Wilson
If you loved Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking - or Nora Ephron's Heartburn - you'll love this
“We live in a decade that worships speed: fast food, one-minute managers, sixty-minute gourmets, three-minute miles. We lace up our running shoes and dash off to get on the fast track. These days we are surrounded by overabundance, but we admire the minimal… We are far too busy to linger over a long, languid meal… [But] every now and again even the fastest of the fast trackers must rest.”
I only read Laurie Colwin’s cult 1998 book Home Cooking last summer, for an episode of Book Chat. Despite the somewhat of a giveaway title, I didn’t clock know it was a cookery book before I read it. (In my defence, the rest of her books are novels.) While I could leave most of the recipes - we have a) very different palettes and b) the recipes are very 80s - I loved what she had to say about love and life, the changing pace of society in the 80s and her best food disasters in the kitchen. “Hey” a friend says to her after one, “wouldn’t it be groovy if we could just dump this in the garbage and go out for dinner?”
Wouldn’t it be groovy.