When you read, do you ever find yourself enjoying descriptions of food and cooking as much as the plot or the characters?  If so, then we have something in common, and here’s a book you might enjoy!

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro (published 2017, 307 pages) – find the book here

Journalist Laura Shapiro traces the lives of six different women throughout history (Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym,  and Helen Gurley Brown) by looking closely at what was on their plates.  Since food is necessarily so central to human life, we can learn a lot by examining the diets and habits of an individual.  For some of these women, food was their career.  For others, food was an enemy or a reminder of separation and loss.  For many of them, food could be a source of simple joy and pleasure.  While a person’s writings or public image may be carefully crafted to deceive, what we know of their gastronomic life does not lie and can reveal new dimensions of people we may have thought we knew.  Dive into the tastes, textures, and smells of these fascinating biographies!

This book made me realize how much I like to read about food!  The women profiled here are very distinct from one another.  Sometimes I felt like a chapter was getting a little away from the topic of food, but honestly I didn’t mind!  My favorite women in the book were probably Rosa Lewis, a turn-of-the-20th century English caterer, and Eleanor Roosevelt.  I hadn’t even heard of author Barbara Pym before, but I quite liked her chapter too.

 

If you enjoy this book, some other books to try are:

Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites by Kate Christensen (published 2013, 353 pages) – find the book here

Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard (published 2010, 310 pages) – check out the ebook from Overdrive

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (published 2007, 370 pages) – find the book here, check out the ebook from Overdrive, or find the eAudiobook on Hoopla!