Ann Hood spins savory tales in ‘Kitchen Yarns’
Ann Hood’s “Kitchen Yarns” (W.W. Norton, 229 pp., ★★★g) arrives just in time to savor in the season when food becomes the expression of family, memories and love.
Proust had his Madeleines. But for Hood, a child of ItalianAmerican immigrants, the evocative flavors of her life include the tomato sauce gravy her grandmother Mama Rose simmered by the vat, the chemical comfort of brownies she and her father baked by the lightbulb of her
Easy Bake Oven and the garlic-studded pork loin that fed her as a single woman, wife and, later, single mom.
As Nora Ephron did in the wonderful “Heartburn,”
Hood retells the chapters of her life through culinary memories, ending each chapter with a recipe, sometimes maddeningly vague, as told by a natural cook. As her mom – nicknamed Gogo – says, “There’s no recipe” for her famous meatballs.
Growing up surrounded by a multigenerational family in Rhode Island, Hood fled for the promise of a more sophisticated life in Manhattan. As a TWA stewardess, preparing martinis and beef bourguignon for business class travelers, she began writing short stories that became her first novel.
She fell in love, married and divorced and endured the losses of her brother, her father and, unfathomably, her 5year-old daughter, Grace. Throughout life’s joys and sorrows, cooking and food sustain, entrance and console Hood when nothing else can.
Certain episodes stand out as especially heartbreaking. As her father succumbs to cancer, Hood desperately tries to nourish him with ice cream and Ensure nutrition shakes. A terrible but enthusiastic cook, her father served up grilled cheese, ham basted in ginger ale and assorted atrocious combinations that Hood appreciates as the embodiment of his devotion to his daughter.
Hood has written painfully of the loss of Grace in “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief ” and her novel “The Knitting Circle.” Her anguish here is no less devastating, as she runs screaming and tearing at her hair from a Thanksgiving gathering.
Hood closes the book with a chapter on Laurie Colwin, the beloved author of such Manhattan love stories as “Happy All the Time” and “Family Happiness” and her recipe for tomato pie. Like a heroine in one of Colwin’s quirky romances, Hood has found true love in her marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, who confessed at a writers’ conference: “Ann Hood doesn’t know this, but I’ve been in love with her for 20 years.” (They had met in passing dec- ades earlier.)
Written in a series of deliciously digestible essays, the wistful and wonderful “Kitchen Yarns” is a feast for the heart, mind and senses.