Women, Memories, and Food
Fri., May 27, 2005
Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table
by Linda Ellerbee
Putnam, 302 pp., $24.95
Linda Ellerbee readily admits that her "thirty-something years as a journalist allowed me to travel and eat while pretending to be working." Luckily for her legion of fans, Ellerbee serves up mouthwatering stories about her "adventures around the world and across the table" with the same frankness and sense of humor that are the hallmarks of her journalism career. There is something wonderful to savor in each chapter here. It was easy to see the nascent newswoman in the Texas teenager who spent a church-sponsored summer in Bolivia learning that the best way to really experience any country is by talking to everyday people and eating everyday food. I longed to share the warmth and hospitality Ellerbee discovered at Don Alfonso 1890 along the Amalfi Coast and was fascinated to learn how American journalists developed a taste for then affordable Iranian beluga caviar while covering the Shah's regime in the Seventies. The chapter on her retreat with her life-long Texas girlfriends (aka the Rhinestone Cowgirls) made me want to hold old friends closer, and I chuckled at her descriptions of family battles about the substance of holiday meals. Each chapter finishes with a recipe or two. Her mom's recently rediscovered Fudge Pie is simple and comforting, and the cream of garlic soup from a restaurant in San Miguel de Allende is luscious. The Stilton and Bacon Cheesecake she picked up on her 60th-birthday trek from the source of the English river Thames down to London is a definite keeper, my new favorite appetizer. Ellerbee's zest for life and her attitude that the best place is the one she hasn't seen yet, the best bite the one she's yet to take, are the soul of her success as a storyteller and the real attractions here. It's great to know she still has "her foot in the road." After devouring this book, I can't wait to see where she goes next. I bet I'll want to eat there, too.