Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook

By Patty Kirk

Book Overview

A captivating memoir from a cook who's traveled across the globe cooking, tasting, and enjoying good food. Patty Kirk has always loved food: eating it, cooking it, sharing it, talking about it. At six, she scrambled the last of the family's vacation provisions over the camp fire and concocted a delicacy-eggs with bacon and onions. Overnight she became the family cook and discovered a lifelong passion for cooking that accompanied her through decades of roaming and finally to the farm in Oklahoma where she now lives. Starting from Scratch narrates Kirk's wanderings in the U.S. and abroad from a culinary perspective, sounding the spiritual, political, and emotional depths of Brillat-Savarin's famous observation, "Tell me what you eat; I'll tell you who you are." In this candid and engaging food memoir---complete with recipes ---good food beckons from the past as well as the future: surrounding us, eluding us, drawing us, defining us.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078522047X
• ISBN13: 9780785220473
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Starting from scratch-Memoirs of a wandering cook

This book is not only a great cook book but a great reader. I enjoyed all her comments and can only wait to try all of her recipes. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves to read about old recipes and even some new one's I found.

Irresistible!

As beautifully written as this book is, I can't figure out why it isn't on every bestseller list. Kirk's descriptions of people, places, and events are irresistible. Of her 24 stand-alone yet interrelated chapters, my favorites are probably "The Summer Before the Jubilee," "The Oven," and "The Turkey," but in truth I savored every last one. And with only a few exceptions (one involving frogs), her descriptions of everything to do with food, from shopping for and cooking it to savoring the results, are so consistently mouth-watering that I found myself hungry from first page to last. But mainly I just relish Kirk's writing, so much so that I even read the recipes with which she concludes each chapter - and I am no cook. I am, however, quite an accomplished eater. In fact, I often thank the Lord for making our source of fuel a source of pleasure. He could, after all, have powered us with something tasteless and texture-less, something that we would've resorted to only when we were running low on energy. Instead, He gave us an almost infinite variety of palate-pleasing treasures. And now, thanks to Kirk and her insights, I know there's even more to be grateful for.