Nikki SilvaReseñas

About different people and their kitchen traditions. Only so-so

Grilled Lamb Chops with Honey Glaze, p.244. Pretty good.
Ruby Blackburn Lambert's Persimmon Pudding, p.12. Good, reduce to 1/3.

This was amazing, and I know it appealed to me more because it was an audiobook and I could listen to real people. The stories were personal, with they themselves telling each one the way they wanted along with sounds and music of the area or era. It was a wonderful collection of stories, and a good way to show how this generation is starting to miss out on the way food brings us together - homemade, with our families, and how it brings about kinship and belonging, and maybe most importantly the memories.

I think “book” is a bit of a misnomer for this particular audio set. That is not to say, however, that it is not worth your time to listen to this CD set. This collection of phone messages and interviews are intended to be about “hidden kitchens” – restaurants off the beaten path or unlikely places where people come together to eat (anywhere from truck stop parking lots to the NASCAR racing pits to prison cells). However, this collection ends up encompassing a lot more – it’s about the food traditions of various countries coming to America, it’s about how food unites people, it’s about the comfort of cooking, it’s about the disappearance of home-grown and home-cooked food in favor of processed, mass-produced food, and it’s about dealing with hunger, to name some of the topics covered. The collection also addresses the Works Progress project, “America Eats,” and in many ways, “Hidden Kitchens” is the completed version of America Eats for modern times. The phone messages and interviews are collected under various headings and some narration is used to introduce each section and connect stories. The only real issue I have with the format of this audio collection is that the foreword comes at the end instead of the beginning. I would recommend this audio set as an interesting look at food culture in America, but it should be noted that is not a cookbook and shouldn’t be entered into with that conception in mind.

This is a must have in any library. It totally transports you to places and times you never quite imagined to actually hear. It is like traveling thru time. If you a lover of history, sound or anything great you will find that in this audio book. It is greatly unexpecting.

This was a membership gift from NPR. I thought, of all my choices, it would be most interesting. I’m glad that I didn’t buy it. The book focuses more on the narratives of the different cooks in unlikely places than on the recipes that they use. All of the stories are excellent reminders that all people love food, and that we are quite clever in inserting good food in our daily life, wherever that might be. The most inspiring to me was the first story of the homeless and nearly homeless who use the George Foreman grill on the streets or in SRO hotels where cooking is forbidden. This is contrasted with Foreman’s life as a child, where hunger was a constant presence. I am sure that I will try some of the recipes, but cannot recommend the book unless you like The Hidden Kitchens on NPR.