Notable Books

A 28-year-old newlywed finishing graduate school, planning for a baby, and running strong on a treadmill should not suddenly have a brain aneurysm. But Jessica Fechtor did. She writes about her close scrape with death and the foods that helped her recover: her stepmother’s butter almond cake, her Jewish mother-in-law’s cholent with kugel, grandma’s apple pie, mom’s chicken soup. Fechtor knows food has healing powers because it connects us to people, memories, and meanings. Although the book contains a few too-precious scenes, Stir is like an undercooked brownie—the gooey center might actually make it better for many.

The Art of Baking Blind

This novel features a cast of amateur bakers competing to earn the title of the New Mrs. Eaden, a British baking icon who influenced a generation of home cooks. Week by week, the five competitors practice their craft and experience personal troubles. The oldest baker is overweight and has a cheating husband. Another has an eating disorder and troubled past. A third is a young single mom looking for a big break. Sarah Vaughan takes the reader behind the scenes of a reality television show and adds a dollop of sex, tragedy, and R-rated language to the otherwise sugary confection.

Delancey: A man, a woman, a restaurant, a marriage

Popular food blogger Molly Wizenberg loved and married a man who hopscotched from one obsession to another, from violin-making to boat-building. So when her husband Brandon decided to open a pizzeria, Wizenberg indulgently played the supportive wife—until he actually cobbled up the funds, leased a storefront, and constructed his own wood-burning oven. Suddenly, “’til-death-do-we-part commitment” took on a new reality. Wizenberg chronicles growing pains and post-honeymoon mistakes in a conversational memoir, with pizza descriptions that pop with flavor and a humor that crackles with self-awareness (and occasional bad language).

In Search of the Perfect Loaf

Samuel Fromartz did what every home baker dreams of: He jet-setted to Paris, Berlin, and all around the United States to learn from world-famous bakers how to bake the perfect bread. Readers benefit by reading about the magic that takes place when yeast meets water, flour, and salt to create something so wonderfully life-giving. The book is part memoir, part food history, and mostly keen, exhaustive food journalism. It goes deep into histories and cultures, the art of fermentation and loaf-slashing, and even the mechanics of wood-fired ovens.

Spotlight

“Food globalization” is a dirty phrase today among many foodies who value local food production. But were it not for the “Columbian Exchange” between New World and Old World foods, this world would be a different place. In Precious Cargo: How Foods from the Americas Changed the World, food historian Dave DeWitt maps the migration of America’s foods to other cultures and cuisines, beginning with Christopher Columbus’ first encounter with American crops such as chili pepper (“the pepper of the inhabitants”), sweet potatoes (“tasted like chestnuts”), and maize (“a cereal with an ear”). He guides readers by food to all corners of the world, including even chili-pepper-loving North Korea, where Kim Jong Il planned to solve his country’s food shortages through mass production of potatoes.

Precious Cargo is a vast-reaching tome entwined with rich history, anthropology, botany, ethnology, and sociology that could have read like a stodgy encyclopedia, but DeWitt’s companionable, upbeat language inspires both interest and wonder. —S.L.