Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

She seemed to like it.

I discovered Laurie Colwin after finding an inspiring cooking quote online. I subsequently ordered this book as a gift and ended up reading it myself. It had my attention from cover to cover. The essays that highlight each chapter open a window to history. Most of the dishes Ms. Colwin favored in her lifetime are not necessarily things an ordinary wife and mother would cook today. But the stories of trial and error, successes and failures are timeless -- even familiar. That said, I made note of at least three of her tried and true recipes I want to try -- fried chicken, homemade bread, zucchini fritters -- and am intrigued by several more. Her motto to "try everything even if it turns out to be a dud" is priceless in any era. Best cookbook I have ever read.

Laurie Colwin’s conversational style and her comfortable tone make reading her writings about food, friends, and family feel like a sit down with a friend. I have enjoyed some of her recipes and disliked the food I produced trying others, but I have always enjoyed visiting with her via her writing, and accepting her invitations to try something new. This book and it’s sequel are two I’ve read again and again over the years.

Both practical and inspiring, bravely diving into variety of cultures with ease and charm. So awful, the author passed away...this makes the whole story desperately sad. However, we still can learn from it a lot! Alex Sobko, PhD, 8762728, Israel

Colwin's novels were puzzling, challenging, and ultimately not for me, though I tried. Her food writing, however, is wonderful. It pulls me in immediately, and is a warm and happy place to be.

excerpted from TheTyee.caI tripped over Colwin's work accidentally, in the 1980s, when a stylishly insane roommate dragged home a stack of Gourmet magazines she'd found in a secondhand bookstore. She was on (yet another) course of self-improvement and had decided competitive cooking would be her thing. I was relieved, since it seemed so much more pleasant than her previous "thing," competitive opera going. She liked to brighten Sunday mornings with highlights from the Ring of Nibelung. (To this day I hate Wagner.)Gourmet Magazine is now a pale shadow of itself, living online, but at the time it was the best example of what would become known as food porn. Gorgeous, faintly erotic photos of food were mixed with copy that read like satire. It was a compendium of hilariously elaborate recipes that took hours to prepare and involved blanching things. And de-boning. And making roux. The prose often bordered on the purple, and I suddenly had an insight into where writers of the Harlequin ilk were getting some of their metaphors.Except for Colwin, who wrote with a restrained, comic tone as if she was about to burst out laughing. Reading Gourmet, I knew exactly how she felt. She alone seemed to cook and eat like a real person, and her column was appropriately called "Home Cooking."The columns have since been collected into two books, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen and More Home Cooking, and they include recipes, but those are incidental. The pieces are really short stories with food, which is how she liked her literature. In the introduction to More Home Cooking, she enthuses over Anna Karenina because of the endless descriptions of what those 19th century Russians were eating. And she admires the all-but-forgotten novels of Barbara Pym for the same reason -- Pym provides meal reports on mid-20th century Brits.All of Colwin's writing has that timeless quality I associate with great literature, particularly when she's writing about food. But she also offers a valuable glimpse of when and how our diets went wrong. In "The Once and Future Dinner Party" she muses over the bizarre food fashions that would eventually leave us all wondering what was safe to put in our mouths.She talks about the beginnings of the trends that led to the whole low-fat mania that so many researchers now suspect of driving obesity statistics."In the past three decades many things we counted on are said to have fallen by the wayside... What cannot be found is a group of people who will sit down and eat what you feed them without a problem. And what cannot be reclaimed is that happy, mindless sense of festive occasion in which no one thought it odd if your dinner party consisted of a rib roast with a crackling rim of fat, a runny triple cream cheese with salad, garlic bread, blue cheese dressing, and a dessert made with a pint or two of cream and six egg yolks."Apparently half her pals were on a diet, the other half had food allergies, and a third half -- she could never resist a joke -- just couldn't bear to eat the way their parents' generation had. Thirty years later the problem is the same, although the offending foods are different. I wish she had lived to see the day when researchers would be arguing in favour of red meat with fat, but only if it's grass fed and kindly raised.She'd appreciate that, since she favoured roasts of all sorts.Courtesy of Colwin, I departed from my vegetarian ways and learned to roast chicken. But I find that her cooking columns rarely lead me to food, they mostly lead me to her fiction....

I read this book many years ago. It did not survive a periodic weeding of my library. I did keep the follow up to this book — More Home Cooking as there were a few recipes I did like and continue to make. This book is not a cookbook. It is a series of essays on food and cooking. There are some recipes but nothing that appealed to me. I think what bothers me is that she comes across as preachy or condescending as she describes how she shops or feeds her child. Not all of us can shop at a green grocer or health food store or fish monger. If you read this as a memoir of sorts it is nice easy reading. The chapter on some horrible dinners she endured was especially good.

I first encountered Laurie Colwin in the title essay for a collection of pieces on cooking and eating alone: "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant." She has the kind of honest, wry but enthusiastic style that marks the best culinary writing. She comes across as the best friend you'd most love to spend time with, and the recipes she offers throughout the book are straight-forward and delicious. If you love the writing of M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichel, you will adore Laurie Colwin

The essays or articles in this volume are funny, clever and entertaining. Colwin’s writing is evocative of time and place. There are a few very readable and easy to follow recipes, but they aren’t really the main point of the book. It’s a shame that the follow up collection, called More Home Cooking, I think, is not currently available in the UK. I’d highly recommend Colwin to anyone with a passing interest in the stuff of the kitchen, or just anyone who is partial to an engaging non fiction writer.

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If you are interested in food and cooking you willlove this book. Not only are the recipes great but the food stories are moving and sometimes funny.

Great read for all cooks x

Occasionally funny, rather well written...but overall pretty dull. The author is too self/centred and she rarely "leaves her kitchen" and ventures into the world. This is cosy, unadventurous food writing. After a while her kitchen becomes claustrophobic.