Lynn Bloom, Author
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Food is hot right now. Everybody is talking about food, in restaurants, in kitchens, in blogs, over the dinner table. Recipe spices up the conversation. Recipe is not a cookbook, but an examination of the social and cultural aspects of recipes. The public life of a recipe lives in specific instructions on how to prepare the actual food, its GPS directions proceeding the best route from start to finish. A recipe’s secret life, much more interesting—as secrets always are—is to provide more subtle guidelines, the byways and scenic routes, for nourishing body, spirit, and self-identity; family and friendships; tradition and innovation; culture, creativity, commerce, and competition.
Any recipe worth its salt will stimulate the mind and the imagination as well as the appetite, as we’ll see as Recipe spills secrets from soup to dessert, with emphasis on comfort foods, Thanksgiving, food insufficiency and ta-daa—chocolate! “I would give up chocolate, says Bloom, but I am not a quitter.”
