The Cookbook Collector: A Novel

by Allegra Goodman
The Dial Press, 416 pp., $26

Don’t be misled by the title – this isn’t a story about the amusing misadventures of a hapless but lovable forager for forgotten recipes, nor are any lame mysteries solved by some muffin-making heroine with shrewd insight and a heart of gold.

Nope, this is a beautifully written comic romance, spinning a classic 19th-century-esque tale of human relationships at the end of the 20th century, told within the context of various American societal tropes and cultural values just prior to 9/11. These include the dot-com explosion and immense wealth it created for twentysomething entrepreneurs, the millennial search for religious/mystical resonance, the tree-hugging radical politics of 1990s Northern California, and the perceived roles of books, literature, history, and aesthetics in an increasingly digital and commercial world.

It’s the saga of two endearing, sometimes irritating sisters: Emily (all of 28) is the brilliant, repressed CEO of a successful Silicon Valley software company; younger, spacier, but equally intelligent Jess studies philosophy at Berkeley, volunteers to save the redwoods, and works in an antiquarian bookstore cataloging valuable antique cookbooks while speculating about their enigmatic, dead collector. The siblings are surrounded by a swirling phalanx of friends, lovers, family, spiritual advisers, and business associates, muddling through confusing modern life separately and together.

While this is not a story specifically about food, its power permeates everything, threading through the narrative like a bright ribbon that ties events together, informs human contacts, evokes memories, longings, and seductions. Food appears everywhere from a scarred commune table covered with expectant pie shells to earnest vegans trying to keep straight what they can eat and in pithy letters written by a long-dead mother: “Don’t doctor recipes. More is less, and sugar will only get you so far.”

There are flaws – too many secondary characters and some ridiculous coincidences – but, regardless, I fell hard for this story of desire, love, regret, and redemption set in territories I know and recognize.

This article appears in November 26 • 2010.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.