Book review: 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert

I love food shows and cookbooks and though I don't read many memoirs,  I had a feeling that 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert would be one that I'd enjoy.  In this book, Ripert tells the story of his life from childhood until his early twenties, which is right before he leaves Europe for a job in Washington D.C.  His early years were not easy, scarred by his parents' divorce, an abusive stepfather and then his father's unexpected death.  As he always had a strong appreciation of food and cooking, he heads to culinary school at fifteen years old, then tells tales of working in elite, stress-filled kitchens for and with the best chefs in the world. 

Ripert shares so many anecdotes that really help you understand why he is the person that he is.  Some of the best sections are ones that touch on his personal mentors and his admiration for the figures in his life.  This was a library book so I couldn't mark up the pages but there were too many lines and paragraphs that I wanted to remember and return to that I started taking very tiny notes on a sticky pad. Some of my favorites:

• When speaking about Jacques, his childhood mentor, in Andorra: "But Jacques's baba au rhum--the rich, yeasty cake soaked to dark run with just the right hint of vanilla--was my true addiction.  One day I asked if his mother had taught him the recipe. "No," he said, holding up the bag of supermarket flour. "The recipe's right on the package. But when you cook a dish with passion, you elevate even a box recipe."  (page 83)

• Ripert tells you step-by-step how he learned to make the perfect souffle and in the process, he makes eggs and butter sound like the most exotic and prized ingredients on earth. (page 102-103)

• While at his first internship during vocational school, he accidentally electrocuted his boss and as a result, learned how to perfectly scrub toilets as punishment. (page 114)

• When he was switched to the pastry station while at his first chef job at La Tour d'Argent in Paris: "I didn't last long: I was kicked off after I ate twenty-five strawberry tartlets and I don't know how many chocolates made for that night's petit-fours." (page 150-151)

And after I finished, I listened to Bon Appetit's podcast episode featuring Ripert and learned even more backstory.  He shared some of the more memorable stories from the book, and confirmed that even some of the moments from his book that take place when he is 5 or 6 years old are still clear and vivid in his mind. I also loved how he spoke of his own former bad behavior in the kitchen, which you would never suspect from his calm, soft-spoken demeanor. 

32 Yolks will make you consider food in a new way.  Ripert describes produce in such luscious language that fruits and vegetables will never look the same to you.  The book will make you want to immediately hop on a plane and walk around a small town in France so you can appreciate the sights and smells and sounds of a new place.  It'll make you think about the small things that happen in your earlier years that have a huge influence on your later life. This is a pretty quick read and I'd definitely recommend it for Ripert's lovely language, the beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking stories of his past and the insight into the food world.

Book Review: Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny

  

I love short stories. I read them and I write them, but I'll freely admit that short story collections are not most readers' first choice.  It's not easy to tell a complete story, to make the world of your characters seem full-blooded, in just a few pages, but when a short story is good, it tends to stick with me longer than some full-length mediocre novels. 

I sought out Katherine Heiny's Single, Carefree, Mellow at a library several towns away because of a story of hers I read years ago in an old New Yorker magazine. The story, "How to Give the Wrong Impression," included in this collection, is told in the second person and focuses on the relationship between two roommates, Gwen and Boris.  I fell in love with the end of the story when Boris finds Gwen cleaning the bathroom late at night while she's wearing an old pair of his boxer shorts.  The language is true and tender, and it is not only something I want to read over and over but it's a perfect example of the type of writing I strive to create.

Single, Carefree, Mellow did not disappoint. Every story was interesting and entertaining in a wonderful way. I flew through the book, then went back and re-read a few favorites. There are three really great stories that feature a woman named Maya, each at a different point in her life. There are nosy neighbors and precocious children and older husbands and loyal best friends. And there's a ton of infidelity. In fact, almost every story features adultery in some way or another. I usually hate when cheating is used as a major plot point but Heiny's characters are flawed and very aware of their mistakes. Like in the real world, no one is perfect and there's nothing wrong with that.

This was one of the best short story collections that I've read in the last few years.  Heiny is able to find humor in even the most ordinary situations, making Single, Carefree, Mellow a real joy to read. Heiny has a novel in the works and I'll definitely be keeping that on my radar for sure.
 

Book Review: The Virgins by Pamela Erens

I can't remember the last book I read that won me over with its tone and narration from the first page.  Taking place during the 1979-1980 academic year at a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire, Pamela Erens' The Virgins follows Aviva and Seung, a couple who has the entirety of Auburn Academy watching as they fall in love all over campus. Is their affection more of a distraction because he is Korean-American and she is Jewish? All signs point to yes, but there's much more to the story. 

The Virgins comes off as simultaneously retro and modern. Pay phones are a necessity and computers don't yet exist, but there's a current day feel in the way the teenage characters operate independently (perhaps that's just a result of the prep school setting).  Aviva is confident in her right to express herself as a sexual being.  Seung is a frequent dabbler in all sorts of recreational drugs. The sex throughout is frank and raw, but never raunchy.  The teens' emotions, fears and interactions are even more frank and raw. Every move, good or bad, makes them more human and even more relateable to the reader.

One of the best parts of The Virgins is that every word is perfectly placed and important to the story. The fact that Erens is able to make almost all of the characters in The Virgins sympathetic in some way is no easy task because so many of them are not terribly likeable.  The narrator, Bruce Bennett-Jones, a classmate of Aviva and Seung, is extremely unreliable as he tells the story as a third-party looking on from afar.  He's infatuated with Aviva, jealous of Seung, and unable to understand why he is not admired or popular among his peers even though he is from a prominent family.

Having Bruce Bennett-Jones as the narrator makes the book feel as though it's a glorified game of 'Telephone' in the best way possible.  Is Bennett-Jones making up these stories? Are they just tidbits of real tales that he's heard that he's spinning into what he wishes had really happened?    Either way, The Virgins is a quiet, tragic novel that makes you think twice about what is really happening behind every closed door and inside every person's mind.

Book Review: Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

I read Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon in one night. Yoon's debut novel contains a mix of traditional chapters, gchat conversations, lists and graphics, and it hooked me immediately.  The story of Maddy, a girl who is literally allergic to everything and unable to leave the house, was real and captivating right from the start.  When she falls in love with the new boy next door, Oliver, she quickly  realizes that she could never have a 'normal' life with him.  She can't even touch him due to her health condition, and as their relationship grows, I truly felt for Maddy. Her world is small but she is relatively happy until she actually knows what she is missing.

I'm hesitant to say more because the plot twists in the second half of Everything, Everything are truly great and I would hate to ruin that for anyone. Trust me when I say that this is the perfect book to devour in a single sitting.

Cooking with Other People's Grandmas

I caught this episode of My Grandmother's Ravioli the other day and have been thinking about it ever since.  Many of my own childhood memories involve my grandmother and we spent much time in her kitchen; Guelda reminded me of her and I even found myself tearing up at several points.

I've seen the show several times before and just love how Mo Rocca really makes an effort to get to know these grandparents.  He spends time cooking with them, listening to their stories and learning about their hobbies and interests. It's clear that he genuinely cares about these lovely people, which is really what makes the show so enjoyable to watch. 

The Cooking Channel cancelled My Grandmother's Ravioli just a few weeks ago actually.  It seems like a random show that was on a strange channel but trust me when I tell you it's so worth a watch. Hopefully, the reruns will run for a long time to come.

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott

 

In many of the books that I read, the setting becomes a character.  Maybe the world is fictional but based on a real city so I can picture that skyline, those sidewalks, the noise that penetrates even through closed apartment windows. Sometimes an author details so vividly the home or office building where their main characters spend much time that I feel like I've walked through that front door before or sat at that conference room table.  The overarching theme in Julianna Baggott's Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders is 'home,' either searching for one, dreaming of one, returning to one, etc. and my favorite parts of the book are her descriptions of the many places where Harriet Wolf has lived and survived before returning, finally, to her parents' house outside Baltimore, where she lives until she dies in the same room where she was literally born.

Perhaps that sounds morbid, but Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders is actually a beautiful story of four women, three generations of the Wolf family. Harriet's story is told in a flashback diary entry way while her daughter, Eleanor, and her granddaughters, Ruth and Tilton, narrate from a present day when Harriet is no longer alive. The present day chapters are interesting, but I'll admit that it was Harriet's story that kept me captivated.

The main storyline of the book focuses on Harriet Wolf as the famous writer.  She wrote a series of six books that have a cult following and there are many devoted fans who believe that Harriet wrote a seventh book that is hidden inside the familial home.  Part of the novel is the 'search' for this seventh book but most of it is just delving into Harriet's past so that her family knows where she came from and why she was the way that she was.  There were so many twists and turns in this woman's life and she overcame so much, from lost love to growing up in a home for mentally disabled children to being an unexpected single mother later in life; these delicate tales that Baggott shares as Harriet almost have heartbeat of their own.

Early in the book, there was a passage that stayed with me:

"Each molecule of story is a universe--grotesque and stunning, all sunlit steam and engines laboring in the chests of trains and creatures with small pink hands and horns...."

A little further down, Baggott as Harriet writes,

"I hope, my dear readers, that your hearts haven't stiffened, rind-tough, or gone dowdy with flab--poor neglected hearts, a tragic crime. May you keep yourselves trimmed--hair, nails, suit jackets--but untamed within. (Be curious)."  (Page 72)

So much is said and so much can be learned from just those few lines.

It took Baggott almost 20 years to write this book, which is easy to believe after reading it. Every story loops back around in some way, every mention of a historic event is deliberate and meaningful to the story and when I finished Harriet Wolf, a book that had an unresolved ending to a certain extent, it didn't feel like there were loose ends.  I feel like every scene in the book probably played out in Baggott's mind hundreds of times before finalized.  It's not easy to write a book about downtrodden events and unfortunate individuals without being depressing but Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders is full of compassion in the very best way.