Poor Man’s Feast
Poor Man’s Feast by Elissa Altman couples a New York Jewess with a Connecticut Yankee WASP resulting in a tangle of prose and recipes. This memoir is much more about the development of this couple’s (lesbian) relationship than the marriage of two cuisines – in other words not a real foodie read. The pinnacle of a foodie’s memoir of growing up in ’50s New York remains Tender to the Bone by Ruth Reichl.
Blue Plate Special
Kate Christensen is another author looking to cache in on the interest in food memoirs – Blue Plate Special is a chronological series of multi-chapter essays describing damaged adults, the havoc that wreaks on their children’s psyches, and, as an afterthought at the end of each essay (not each chapter), a couple of recipes. I got bored with her fish out of water traumas and didn’t find much to amuse in the recipes, dipped and skipped, and then lost interest.