Season to taste

  

   Part food memoir, part family history, part autobiographical 'coming to terms', Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen by Matt McAllester is a very moving book and one I am glad to have read.

   The process of unravelling the ties which bind us to our loved ones can be gentle and slow, contrived and complicated or painful and brutal. When Matt McAllester's mother died unexpectedly, this journalist and war correspondent found himself utterly floored by grief. A natural and fitting reaction, one might think, but mental illness had taken Ann McAllester from herself and her family some thirty years before, and while her son had grown up with her physically he was emotionally separated from the person she'd become, someone far removed from the loving, stable woman she'd been during his early childhood.

    In his sadness and with a profound sense of loss, Matt tries to 'keep hold' of his mother - "there was one way I might bring my mother back: heading to the kitchen and cooking her recipes". Working his way through Ann's annotated collection of Elizabeth David and others he tries to recreate her dishes, connecting with his boyhood when the family was whole and happy, using food to remember and to heal. He is then moved to piece together his mother's decline, covering her troubled life as he would a journalistic assignment, recalling the most painful of times, and in the process, making discoveries about himself and seeing a way to move on.

   I found this account enormously interesting for a number of reasons: Matt grew up in Edinburgh and lived about a mile away from me, so many of the local references are very familiar, the book includes recipes - Matt's own, evolved from what he found in the cookery books - and much food content besides, but it's the personal story which is so affecting, so harrowing at times, but which makes important reading. This is a powerful story, frank, sometimes funny, and ultimately it is about how and why it is closing the book - whether cookbook or life story - which matters. I recommend it unreservedly.

Comments

[m]

Did you see this story the Telegraph the other day? It sounds a lovely book.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7482800/Comfort-food-Matt-McAllester-on-his-mother-cooking-and-grieving.html

[m]

It sounds like it's a lovely book, I meant to say.

[Cornflower]

I did indeed (see yesterday's post), and it was reading that extract that made me pick up the book and go on with the story.

[Jennifer]

I love these types of books, food is so wrapped up in every part of our being, it's wonderful to read other people's stories.

[m]

Sorry, hadn't noticed that you'd linked it already.

[Cornflower]

The more links the better!

[Julie Fredericksen]

The trouble with reading a U.K. book blog is waiting for these books to come out in the U.S.!!

[Cornflower]

There's a US edition, Julie! Have a look here: http://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Lessons-My-Mothers-Kitchen/dp/0385342187/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269718135&sr=1-3