Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books
Cara Nicoletti
2 ratings • 1 reviews
Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books
Cara Nicoletti
2 ratings • 1 reviews
An Irresistible Literary Feast Stories and recipes inspired by the world's great books As a young bookworm reading in her grandfather's butcher shop, Cara Nicoletti saw how books and food bring people to life. Now a butcher, cook, and talented writer, she serves up stories and recipes inspired by beloved books and the food that gives their characters depth and personality. From the breakfast sausage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods to chocolate cupcakes with peppermint buttercream from Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, these books and the tasty treats in them put her on the road to happiness. Cooking through the books that changed her life, Nicoletti shares fifty recipes, including: * The perfect soft-boiled egg in Jane Austen's Emma * Grilled peaches with homemade ricotta in tribute to Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That" * New England clam chowder inspired by Herman Melville's Moby-Dick * Fava bean and chicken liver mousse crostini (with a nice Chianti) after Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs * Brown butter crêpes from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl Beautifully illustrated, clever, and full of heart, Voracious will satisfy anyone who loves a fantastic meal with family and friends-or curling up with a great novel for dessert.
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Read most of this book for Miller book club.
This book is a collection of essays, each one on a particular book's role in the author's life as a reader, and how the food in that book is both important to the work as well as to Nicoletti herself. As a chef and butcher, she then ends each essay with a designed recipe, often a modernized version of a significant dish in the literature.
I liked reading about the food in the chosen books, and it certainly brought back memories of drooling over the food descriptions I've read in my own favorite novels! I thought that Nicoletti was charming and funny about herself, though overall I didn't particularly care about many of her anecdotes. More interesting to me was the discussion of the role of food or a particular dish in a book (and often how the book's author uses food description throughout) and I found myself analyzing these stories in a new way.
Nicoletti's recipes were interesting to skim, but pretty much all of them required many ingredients I don't typically have to hand and many recipes were extremely involved and complicated. I had fun reading what she came up with, but had no desire to attempt to prepare any of the recipes.
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