Rating: 
Summary: Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipe
Review: A delightful book. I couldn't decide whether to keep reading or run to the kitchen and start cooking!
Rating: 
Summary: Foodie Barbie's Dream Book: Class Dismissed
Review: The hot-pink title should be a tip-off: What might we deduce about the taste level of someone who would name a fluffy cookbook/memoir in reference to an earlier book ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar") about the murder of a lonely crippled woman?
Nonetheless, this is a physically attractive, if precious little book, with its chick-lit cover, rosy endpapers and the '50s-style line drawings that make everyone look impossibly pretty, thin, rich and happy. Like the '50s women's-magazine ads they evoke, the drawings seem to have created an alternate reality -- not quite the right tone for something that purports to be autobiography, interrupted with recipes.
I can't help comparing this book with the late Laurie Colwin's two memoir/cookbooks. Like Colwin's books, this one gives personal tips on how to cook dishes that have worked for the author, setting them in a context of entertaining family and friends through various life passages. The reason novelist Colwin's food-focused books worked for me and this one didn't, though, are the ingredients Hesser leaves out, as much as those she puts in. There's a little too much about her personal life not to have put in a little more. For instance, she hints at a class gap between her family of origins and her husband's (struggling single mom vs. college president and his hostess wife), but she won't quite go the distance and tell us how she feels about that.
There's a lot about her food-snob criticisms of her husband-to-be's eating habits, but one wonders if she ever felt any insecurity about the background gap. How she jumped the class fences would be intriguing, but she doesn't tell us how she got to train as a cook in France, nor how she got to write for the NYT while still in her 20. Either would be more interesting than her vacillations between a wedding dress from Valentino vs. one by Prada.
More fascinating are the occasional glimpses into her rather steely careerist side, and it's hard to tell if she's conscious of a rather nasty habit of biting the hand that fed her. As a young factotum for a French restaurateur, she once picked up Julia Child at Orly airport. During a drive and a lunch, she doesn't seem to have had any shop talk with one of the first American women to popularize the art of fine cooking, but shows Child as the loopy, "Saturday Night Live" caricature of herself, smiling dimwittedly at hostile French teens as the only elderly person eating at their hangout. Other food critics are kicked in the teeth for their pretensions, though it's not made clear why they are less palatable than the author's own.
There's a partial exposure of Hesser's family that reminds me of Martha Stewart's soft-focus presentation of her Polish-American family. You get the family recipes, but no sense of how these people feel, think or live their daily lives. In a particularly mean scene,"Mr. Latte" mocks the author's grandmother's npn-standard pronunciation of the word "terrible" to Hesser's apparent amusement.
I put this book down twice, but sucked up the smarminess to keep browsing through the recipes, some of which at least sound good. (Others, influenced by the gimmicky restaurants she covers, sound like a clash of too many random flavors.)I wish, though, that she had told a story worthy of her rather tough, direct style. This book -- pictures, pink and all -- is just too cute for words.
Rating: 
Summary: Yummy!
Review: I read an advanced reader's copy of this book and loved it. It's so sweet and fun. I really like how the recipes are included at the end of each chapter, I won't be making most of them as I am a vegetarian. I read this book in a matter of a few days because it's a fast read and really enjoyed following Amanda and Ted's relationship through the short chapters and food menus. :) My only complaint is that the chapters were too short at times, I felt like she could have given us more of a deeper look into the relationship, it seemed a bit high-level at times and it didn't allow you to become attached to the characters as you do in some books.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: After reading a glowing review of this book, I checked it out of my library. I was instantly smitten and decided I needed to own this book because of the fabulous recipes. I enjoyed it first as an autobiography and will continue to enjoy it as a cookbook. And, yes, I'm a "foodie"! Amanda Hesser is a natural writer, very cozy and almost conversational. I know I would like her because her personality shines though, and she's most engaging.
Rating: 
Summary: bad recipe
Review: i heard ms. hasser at the national public radio (npr) and was very excited to by the book and try the dump-in chocolate cake .... but it turned out to be a big deception. the cake was not tasteful at all, easy to cook and really a lot of dumping but no good.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful and Fun Read
Review: Amanda Hesser is one of the most talented food writers today. She departs from her more serious forays into a fun, quick, engaging read. Perfect beach fodder for foodies. I found myself dog-earring so many recipes, the book is now twice as thick as when I bought it. Her recipes work, too, a major bonus considering most recipes in cookbooks churned out by the "hottest" chef don't. It's a delightful book.
Rating:
Summary: Viking-stove fire of the vanities
Review: The Friends vision of NY, scrubbed preppies fresh from the suburbs romping around the Upper West Side like it's one giant, singles-friendly Starbucks--that is what's being packaged here. The problem is that it's so...boring. This is Sex and the City without the sex, or the city. When Amanda Hesser writes about food, she's actually not bad. When she writes about herself, banalities pile on top of trivialities and the whole thing slides into self-parody, at which point it's so bad that it's almost, but not quite, good.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book, but NOT for curmudgeons!!!
Review: In one way, this is simply a book about making connections through the medium of sharing food, or, in some cases, making connections in spite of that act. Of course, the main connection is the one that propels the narrative: the developing relationship between the author and Mr. Latte.
Though the pair have many things in common from the beginning, taste in food is emphatically not one of these. With candor and elan, Ms. Hesser writes of the bumpy ride she and Mr. Latte take from their first (blind) date to the altar. As with all good relationships, there are missteps, misunderstandings, attitude adjustments on both sides, leaps of faith, and the desire to make it work against pretty substantial odds. By the end of the book, they've both changed. The connection is made.
But there are smaller connections: the kinship established between Ms. Hesser and Prakash, a visitor from India, after they share a meal together at an upscale new York restaurant. This connection, by the way, comes about only from the exigencies and conditions of Ms. Hesser's profession as a food writer, a profession seen at first by her visitor from the third world as exceedingly odd and, probably, rather superficial.
There is the connection between Ms. Hesser and her grandmother, a relationship tested by a family trip to Italy where Grandmom was not quite as receptive to doing as the Romans do when in Rome as Amanda would have liked. Yet after a subsequent visit to her grandmother's house on the Eastern Shore, all is well again, thanks to a meal of soft-shelled crabs, yellow wax beans and blueberry pie.
And then there is the dinner shared by a group of Amanda's and Mr. Latte's friends in the very sad aftermath of September 11th. The friends came from many places, from Bolivia, Los Angeles, Mexico City, England, and New York, of course- a multipronged, mulitnational and, in the circumstances, very comforting connection indeed..
Throughout, Amanda shares the recipes that accompany these episodes of her life. And they are wonderful recipes. I have been cooking for thirty years, with pretty high standards myself, and I am captivated by them. Judy Hesser's oven-fried chicken is superb. And the Branzino poached in olive oil is unlike any fish dish I've ever tried, so fragrant and meltingly tender! And then there is Baba's Ginger Duck. If reading about that doesn't transport you to another world, then you are not one of those for whom this book is written, that is to say, those who enjoy the life of the senses, of conviviality, of culinary pleasures simple as well as sophisticated. And if the story of this young woman's love affair with her equally engaging young man doesn't charm you, then, really, that is your loss. Resign yourself to eternal curmudgeondom and be done with it.
Thank you, Ms.Hesser, for having shared so much with the rest of us.
Rating:
Summary: partially hydrogenated fluff
Review: What a silly and irritating book. Why would Hesser portray herself as such a nitwit? It read like a bad single girl novel, only minus the gravitas. Those line-drawings say it all.
Rating:
Summary: "Holly Golightly" Does Food
Review: ... This is, without question, a charming, and disarmingly written book. It is written from the perspective of a foodie, and surprize, not everyone uses food as the prizm through which they filter life. What makes this book so much fun is that it is a much a story about a young women finding her voice, her career, and her true love, as it is about food. The critical reviews contained on this page that challenge the book as shallow, miss the point. Books written by atheletes are about sports. Books written by actors are about acting. Ms. Hesser's life is inextricably bound up with food, and food is no more or less a compelling organizing principle than sports or acting or anything else. To criticize the book because the author finds the sub text of her important life choices in her relationship with food strikes me as a little self-righteous. What is so much deeper or more important? Ms. Hesser's New York City, is alive with the sights, sounds, and smells from its kitchens. Her book captures the warm memories of the family meal, holiday banquet, and magical first breakfast you share with your true love. Anyone with a taste for New York, and new love, will devour Ms. Hesser's story.
|
