Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays From ‘The New York Times’

edited by Amanda Hesser
W.W. Norton & Co., 192 pp., $24.95

The memorable meal isn’t necessarily the best meal you ever ate. It may be the one over which you fell in love. Or the one where you dared to ingest raw meat.

In Amanda Hesser’s (The New York Times Maga­zine food editor) collection of essays from some of America’s leading writers, Eat, Mem­ory draws with literary aplomb the correlation of what and how we eat to who we are. Eating is such an essential and sensual experience, it is as revealing a personality trait as any writer could examine. Except of course if you’re George Saunders, who claims in his essay to have given up eating four years ago. Extreme, yes, but on the plus side, he has gained 70 pounds!

Each essay includes a recipe from the ultrasimple (Saunders’ Light as Air Brunch, which instructs the cook to whip up air in a bowl and to consume upon cooling) to the advanced (the recipe for oeufs mollets with béarnaise sauce that caused Julia Childs to fail at Le Cordon Bleu). And each essay is a delicious gem to savor, like a memorable meal.

Sunday, 11am-noon, Cooking Tent

This article appears in John McCain.

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