“Eating: A Memoir” by James Epstein is exactly what it sounds like: a book about memories involving food. It is part biography and part recipe book, but it fails to completely satisfy the reader’s appetite in either area.
There are parts that are delicious and parts that need more spice to get the right taste.
One delicious aspect of the book is how Epstein relates food to his memories. As an editor of cookbooks and an amateur cook himself, he has a wealth of knowledge about food; and if the senses of smell and sight can bring back vivid and wonderful memories, Epstein’s palate has the same power, which he uses to effectively translate his memories not only into words but also into expressions, feelings and nostalgia.
One passage I especially enjoyed was his story of eating hamburgers with his friends every day after their summer jobs in 1942. Reading about how he used to spend his days as a 14-year-old and the places he used to eat hamburgers may not sound very interesting at first, but his style and his weaving of food into the memory make it entertaining.
Epstein does not close a chapter without giving at least one recipe: from how to make hamburgers to how to kill lobsters. Recipes are the heart of the book but are the toughest part to chew. Sometimes, they seem to get in the way of his story, while other times they are too long of an interruption between stories. The good thing, though, is that he writes them like a story instead of a list of instructions. And he sometimes speaks directly to the reader, which makes the reader feel that Epstein believes cooking is for everybody.
It’s a nice feeling, but since some of the recipes are somewhat complicated and their ingredients are quite expensive, it’s frustrating to read about something delicious that one cannot easily enjoy. For example, “braised duck with olives” and “egg foo yung” sound amazing, but they take time and money to prepare, and it’s like that for most of the recipes.
However, if you’re hungry for a story, this book will fill you up as much as a rice cake. Epstein’s memories are short and almost always concentrated on the food present. The stories are intriguing, but they are disconnected, so the reader has a hard time structuring his life out of the fragments he gives. For example, he writes about the food he enjoyed during his honeymoon, but then implies they divorced and then mentions another wife with no clear context for these events. He drops you off at one memory then picks you up and drops you at another one years later, with little explanation.
Unless you are a food aficionado, “Eating” is not the kind of book you would put on your must-read list. But because it is under 200 pages and often interesting, it will not hurt to read it. To do so is to remind ourselves that if humans had no emotion, personality or intellect, we would still have our appetite in common.
