As a knitter, I especially enjoyed this memoir. Coupled with food and author's life tidbits - most interesting. Well written and flowed well.

I am a knitter and know Ann Hood through her books about knitting, so the title, “Kitchen Yarns” jumped out at me. The essay, “My Father’s Pantry,” reflects the type of cooking I grew up with Rice-a-Roni, Shake ‘n’ Bake, or recipes made with Campbell’s Cream-of-Something or Other Soup. My true knowledge and appreciation of food and cooking food is a result many years of living with my husband, who began cooking as a boy, inspired in the kitchens of his mom, aunts, and grandmothers. His skills rival any chef’s. The essays in this book resonate from watching him choose ingredients and prepare, and not only eating his meals, but the sheer anticipation of them. These essays demonstrate how cooking can be a creative outlet, and how food can be a celebration, a relief, or a comfort when “life happens.” Wonderful warm read during this cold, snowy winter!

Part-memoir, cookbook and a series of essays. Ann Hood's book is great to dip in and out of. We can all relate to life through the prism of food cooked and meals eaten no matter how grand or humble our own eating.

Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food by Ann Hood was a delight to read. It was like eating comfort food except in book form—it engaged this reader and gave her a warm fuzzy feeling while reading both the happy and the sad sections it was so captivatingly written. I highly recommend reading this book.

What genre is the book? Well, it is a food memoir. In it, a sixty something Ann Hood looks back at her life through the ups and downs and the different phases through the lens of food and recipes. It is much more than a book about food however...

Hood is a wonderful storyteller and through the nearly 30 essays the book contains you see glimpses of life that you as a reader can identify with. Hood grew up in a large, loving Italian family and you see that family through her growing up eyes as well as savor the food she ate. She was a teen model for a department store and got to delight in special foods made and sold by those stores. Through her memories and recipes we remember another era and the now defunct department stores. She also shares memories from being a TWA flight attendant, a longtime writer, a wife, a divorcee, a mother ( blessed with living children but also the heartbroken mother of a daughter who died at a young age), and most of all a cook.

Hood expresses her raison d’être behind the essays and recipes much more eloquently than I can at the beginning of the book:

““It seems to me,” M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.”

This is how my culinary life began—in a big, noisy family, in rooms overflowing with people and food, with the rustic peasant food of our village. But even in the midst of this, no one ever taught me how to cook. Kitchen Yarns is my journey from that family and that childhood through my early efforts at cooking—flank steak marinated in Good Seasons salad dressing to impress a boy I liked in college; pesto made with two cups of dried basil—to diligently copying recipes from The Silver Palate Cookbook as a young single woman living in New York City to trying to make the perfect spaghetti carbonara, like the one I ate in Rome on a layover as a TWA flight attendant. Eventually, I became a very good home cook, throwing elaborate dinner parties and cooking in the kitchen with my own children. Today, I’m married to the food writer Michael Ruhlman, who has taught me how to properly dice an onion and make chicken stock in the oven while I sleep, and who mixes me his recipe for whiskey sours at the end of a long day.

I realized as, over the years, I wrote essays about food—Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie, my father’s mac and cheese—that as M.F.K. Fisher said, writing about food is really writing about love. When I write an essay about food, I am really uncovering something deeper in my life—loss, family, confusion, growing up, growing away from what I knew, returning, grief, joy, and, yes, love. It was impossible to put these essays in chronological order. Like so many things about complicated issues, the themes and settings and time frames overlap, recede, jump forward. I tried to put them in loose chronological order, but my adult self and my present self keep having new realizations about my younger self, and so that intrudes on those earlier recollections and stories I tell. They move crookedly from my earliest memories of fried chicken, to the food my mother made when I was a child, to that Spaghetti Carbonara and Silver Palate Chicken Marbella, to my young children, my divorce, my new happy marriage. To me, there is a shape that is not unlike a recipe: it starts at the beginning, but as ingredients are added, it becomes something different. Each essay stands alone, but taken as a whole, they make a life—mine.”

“How we entertain is a combination of who we are and how we live, of all the dinners we've had and all the dreams we still embrace,” she writes in an essay entitled: Party Like It’s 1959 which begins with the following paragraphs and ends with the recipe for the perfect Whiskey Sour and Cherries Jubilee as made at home:

“When I was a child, dinner parties seemed to belong to some vague and distant grown-up world where women wore shiny dresses with tight bodices and full skirts, bright lipstick, and strings of perfect pearls. The men, I imagined, wore ties and wingtips. They drank fancy cocktails and ate prime rib on heavy china. This image came from Saturday afternoon movies and glossy magazines, pictures of an adult world I could only peek into.

Now that I’m a grown-up, my dinner parties look nothing like the ones I used to imagine. My plates are colorful Fiesta ware. The drink of choice is wine—red or white. No one is very dressed up. And the food is always an experiment. I give my guests chimichurri sauce, ginger martinis, Israeli couscous, green-chile tamales, paella. When I go to dinner parties, I’m served tandoori chicken, Moroccan tagines, and spaghetti—carbonara, puttanesca, or arrabbiata. I’m served family-style, with make-your-own pizzas or tacos.

That is, this format held until a Saturday night in the early 1990s.”


Here is another portion of an essay entitled ‘Tomato Pie’:

“I COME FROM a public beach kind of family—no pool clubs or private cabanas for us. Growing up, I spent most of my summers sweating in our backyard or watching game shows on TV, sitting in front of the fan and eating root beer ice pops. My mother worked at a candy factory, stuffing plastic Christmas stockings with cheap toys and candy all summer. But she got Fridays off, and she and my aunt would load us kids into one of their station wagons and drive down to Scarborough Beach, where my cousin Gloria-Jean and I sat on a separate blanket and pretended not to know the rest of the family. We had plans, big plans. To leave Rhode Island and our blue-collar, immigrant-Italian roots behind. Even at the beach, we toted Dickens or Austen, big fat books that helped the hot, humid summer pass.

I did escape. First to college, where I waitressed every summer at a tony beach club and studied how the women there held their fancy drinks—brandy Alexanders and Lillet with a twist of orange peel. I studied how they held themselves, too, the way they shrugged their sweaters from their shoulders directly into a man’s waiting hands. The way they looked, a combination of boredom and amusement. Outside the club, their children learned how to play tennis and how to dive, how to order lunch from the guy at the grill and sign their parents’ names and membership numbers on the bill.

In 1978 I became a flight attendant for TWA, a job I held for the next eight years, serving mostly businessmen in first class. In training we learned how to carve chateaubriand, dress lamb chops in foil stockings, mix a perfect martini. I developed a taste for the leftover caviar and the champagne from duty-free shops across Europe. Eventually I settled on Bleecker Street in New York City and fulfilled a dream I’d had since I’d read Little Women in second grade: I became a writer. As is often the case, with success came a longing for home. We yearn so much to leave our small town, our childhood home, the familiar. Yet somehow once we’ve left it all behind, it beckons us back. How I longed for the taste of my mother’s meatballs; the casual way I would flop onto the couch beside my father, dropping my feet into his lap; the noisy nights around the kitchen table with all those loud, Pall Mall–smoking, black coffee–drinking relatives; the long, sandy beaches of Rhode Island with the smell of Coppertone, and clam cakes frying in oil mingling with the salty air.”

Of course the essays—which read like comfort food—are followed by delectable recipes and intriguing ones like:

“SAM’S POTATOES These potatoes are best made by a child under the age of ten.”

OR

“Spaghetti carbonara has become my comfort food, the food I make when I’m lonely like I was that long-ago afternoon in Rome, the food I make when I want to welcome others into my home. I still love my red sauce, and I dip my bread into that simmering pot on my mother’s stove. But to me, spaghetti carbonara is the food not of my youth, but of my first steps into adulthood.

MY PERFECT SPAGHETTI CARBONARA I am begging you, please do not put cream in your carbonara sauce. Don’t even order carbonara in a restaurant if cream is used. The creaminess comes from the magical alchemy of Parmesan cheese and eggs and pasta water. Once I went to a dinner party where carbonara was served and it not only had cream, it also had mushrooms! Which is, I suppose, fine, if it’s not called carbonara but instead is described as pasta with a mushroom-and-bacon cream sauce. However, feel free to use a pasta other than spaghetti, such as rigatoni or anything with the shape and ridges to hold the sauce. In Italy, there are somewhere between 260 and 350 types of pasta—the number varies with your source—and they are specifically designed with the purpose of clinging to a particular sauce in mind. It is said that the best carbonara is made with guanciale, which is cured pork jowl, or cheeks. Since this isn’t typically available at your local Stop & Shop, pancetta can be substituted. But I am a big advocate of using very good bacon. Do not put butter or oil on the cooked pasta—that prevents the sauce from clinging to the pasta. And be sure to cook the pasta only until al dente, which is usually about 9 minutes. But you can only be sure by tasting. I once had a date fling some spaghetti against the kitchen wall to see if it was cooked; this method, though dramatic, proved fallible.”

You’ll need to get a copy of the book for the actual recipes, but I think I’ve made my case for how delightful this new book by Ann Hood is!

Thank you W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it.

Anyone who gets nostalgia for a favorite childhood meal, or who remembers events largely by what they ate, will find good company in Ann Hood's memoir. Chapters are set to memories of the meals most important to her, and she has a way with the words that describe these meals, the company she ate them with, the place they had in her life. The stories are a bit repetitive, but there are some that are uniquely moving.

A quick, fun read from Ann Hood. Gives hope to a would be home cooks. What an interesting life this author as had!

I must admit I am a perfunctory cook, I don’t mind it, but I can’t say I love it. What I do love is reading about people who view cooking as a kind of art, a passion, something to be shared with others. I have long loved the stories Nigel Slater includes in his cookbooks and his memoir, Toast, now I add Ann Hood to my list of people that can make the preparation of food an almost religious experience. You don’t have to be a cook, or even enjoy cooking to enjoy this memoir of food as a backdrop to life

Kitchen Yarns is one of the best-titled books I have read. The title is reflective of the author’s memories and interactions with friends, family and food as she experienced bonds shared, strengthened, broken or lost. Each yarn/ or essay is a brief story that explores the meaning of her relationships and how they shaped who she became as a writer, mother, daughter, friend and partner. Personal anecdotes and the included recipes, propel the reader into the following chapters. The appetite is whetted for more thought and food for thought. Hood is generous by sharing so much of herself. She is also generous by sharing her family recipes and how they became part of her life. Most of the recipes seem to be easily undertaken by even a beginning cook. Some of the earlier recipes, of Hood’s childhood, may evoke a sense of memory in one’s own younger days. These are not gourmet ones, but the ones that just make you happy or nostalgic for the smells and sights of your family’s own kitchen. This book is sure to be a winner for gift-giving and book discussions – of readers’ own experiences and recipes. Recommended.

Growing up in an Italian American family, Ann Hood remembers her grandmother's tiny kitchen and how there was always something simmering, usually a tomato sauce that they called gravy; an all purpose sauce to smother bread in for an after school snack or to cover pasta.

Her dad's military career meant moving often, which was especially hard on her mother who was raised in a close-knit family.  Hood has many fond memories centering around food with her family, from her dad's simple fried chicken to her mom's fancy sandwiches for PTA meetings and elaborate school lunches.

Each essay is full of nostalgia and accompanied by comforting recipes that represent a certain time period in her life.  She isn't ashamed to admit she loves American cheese because it reminds her of her dad (a cook who didn't realize he couldn't cook well), and she recounts the history of her fail proof dinner party dish Chicken Marbella and how it factored in to her adult life and marriage.

Suffering multiple tragedies over the course of her life from the sudden and unexpected deaths of her aunt, brother, and then her five year old daughter, Ann Hood uses food and memory as catharsis.

With charming descriptions, funny observations, and heartbreaking honesty, Kitchen Yarns chronicles a life of family, home, love, and loss and its one constant comfort:  food.

Thanks to W.W. Norton Company and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.  Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food is scheduled for release on December 4, 2018.

Kitchen Yarns is a casual memoir with food. Ann Hood recounts her life through its phases of learning to cook and relationships connected to those times. It’s chatty and fun, as if you and she were sitting in her family room in two big cozy chairs, each with a glass of wine, something delicious to munch on and sharing stories of your lives.
She starts out describing her Italian Grandma Rose, constantly cooking heavenly, fresh meals, but never once letting Ann or the other kids into her tiny kitchen. The result, Ann never learned to cook any of these meals! (I on the hand, watched and learned everything my mother made; but did not become a writer or a chef.) Ann moves on to college trying out a few meals to impress a few boys. After college she lands a job as a flight attendant for TWA (remember them?!), flies everywhere and shares an apartment in Boston with five roommates. No one cooks anything, ever.
Eventually she has her first serious relationship and decides to follow a recipe, changing one key ingredient. What follows is a disastrous pesto meal for an understanding boyfriend. (Great story.) She moves on, thankfully, to the memorable, “Silver Palate” cookbook, super popular in the 1980’s. Of course, Ann marries, has two children who stand on stools and cook with her almost every day.
Here is where our walk “down the yellow-brick road” ends. At five years old, her daughter, Grace dies suddenly, from a severe case of strep throat. (yes, they did everything.) Life is not the same for a long time. I’ve read most of Ann’s books, but this is the first time she can really talk about the pain and grief she wen through losing a child. She worked through it, as mothers do, with seven-year-old Tommy, still at home to raise.
The family was living in an old, restored, Victorian house in Providence, RI, not far from Ann’s hometown. She talks a lot about her neighborhood. Before that marriage ended, they adopted one-year-old, Annabelle from China, which brought new challenges and new joy to the family.
Currently, Annabelle is fourteen years old living with the happily remarried Ann and her “sweetie” (her word), writer and chef, Michael Ruelman. Ann’s book is sprinkled with humor and many of her favorite recipes.
Look for Ann’s book Dec. 4, 2018 and wish her a Happy Birthday on Dec 9th!

Thank you NetGalley, W.W. Norton, and Ann Hood

I have read most everything that Ann Hood has written. However, I was disappointed in this one. The content in most of these essays, I have read before. It is really more of a cookbook, although the recipes sound wonderful.

I picked this book to read on a whim and I am so glad that I did. Each essay focused on a life experience with a certain food and was then followed by a recipe or two. I loved reading the connection to a person or place with the cuisine. It also brought back childhood memories and experiences with family, friends, and food. Great book!

A warm and thoughtful gathering of essays from one of my favorite authors. I see that it is scheduled to be published right before the winter holidays, which makes it a perfect choice as a gift to all of your close female friends, sisters, moms, grandmothers and colleagues. Love this and can't wait to recommend it.

What powerful memories food evokes. I loved reading Ann's stories about some of the food and recipes that meant so much to her. Each chapter ends with the recipe that the story refers to.
Some of these recipes stirred up my own memories of growing up and made me smile and realize the link between food and family.

Ann Hood is a master of opening up her heart and letting you in. I loved these family stories and the recipes included. A great light read for anyone who loves to cook.

I loved everything about this book- from the stories about Hood's life to the recipes included in each chapter. A little gem of a book. Highly recommend.

I'm a sucker for any book about food and this one was no exception. Hood's latest is a dip into her life and her loves and this collection of essays and recipes will be sure to warm your soul. Make sure you don't read on an empty stomach or you'll come away from the page with a deep abiding hunger and a need to run to the kitchen and whip up a bunch of meatballs. Delizioso!

Funny how food captures so many of our life moments. Some of our recipes become cherished as heirlooms to be passed on, others are our goto comfort foods. I loved this book. Ann Hood's recipes color her life , as mine do mine. Kindred spirit! Food figures at every opening , and closing chapter of my life and I enjoyed reading about her life. Pour a nice glass of wine and grab some hearty Italian food, settle down with this book and enjoy. Great book!

Food can bring about memories like any event related to the senses. Family and friends gather around food for a variety of reasons. Food brings comfort and many people associate it with love. In Kitchen Yarn, Ann Hood tells the story of her life-the choices she made, sorrows she endured, the loving, Italian family she was a part of. And all of the memories she associates with food. Some of the stories felt repetitive, they were still heartfelt. I really want to try most of the recipes she provided.

This is the kind of book you can imagine becoming lightly flour dusted and possibly sauce stained but holding its place on a kitchen shelf with other treasured cookbooks. While it is part memoir, part cookbook, Hood amplifies and interprets her memories through ingredients and memories and will inspire writers to do the same. This is a homey and sometimes confessional book that feels very personal. Hood's personality as a generous and sensitive soul shines through the recipes and narrative.