Book Review: A Homemade Life

Molly Wizenberg can write about food.  Reading her book, you can almost taste her red cabbage salad with lemon and black pepper, roasted eggplant ratatouille, or banana bread with chocolate and crystallized ginger.  A Homemade Life is a cookbook.  It has detailed recipes for all sorts of dishes.  It's also a memoir about her life.  Each recipe she's included in the book is deeply entwined with personal memories about her life and her family.  She writes about how cooking, spending time in the kitchen, and sitting down to a good meal, connected her family and brought them all closer together through good times and bad.

Molly comes from a family that likes to cook.  Some of her fondest memories are helping her parents in the kitchen.  She shares the secret ingredient for her dad's potato salad and describes the many different kinds of Christmas cookies that her mother made each year during the holidays.  She reminisces about making pancakes for breakfast with real maple syrup with her father in the mornings.  She also writes about her time in Paris, starting her blog Orangette, and meeting her husband all of which were marked by a memories of a particular dish.

For Molly recipes are more than a list of ingredients.  She believes recipes are meant to be shared.  That they are organic because they grow and change.  Recipes are more that the sum of ingredients, they incorporate the memories of people and places.  Molly Wizenberg is passionate about food and it's evident in A Homemade Life.  She has a gift for cooking and she's a talented food writer as well.  She's also got a new book coming out soon.  It's called Delancy and I can't wait to read it.