I’ll be back very shortly with another vego update, but in the meantime the article that helped tip us into our vego month appeared in the Good Weekend magazine yesterday. I spent a week cooking and eating offal – and some of it was a leetle scary!
If you’re interested in reading, the article is now up on my website here.
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Love & Hunger: Thoughts on the Gift of Food is a book about the emotional & symbolic meaning of cooking for people you love. It's a distillation of everything writer Charlotte Wood has learned over 25 years of home cooking, about the pleasures of simple food well made.
"Wood writes beautifully about food. Partly it's because she has something to say about life, not just about food ... Wood's nimble food writing shifts seamlessly from the hotly contested topic of table-setting on one page to grappling with hunger on another. No philosophy, snobbery, one-upmanship, no competing with restaurant cooks. Just a lot of honesty and admission of failings, mistakes, triumphs and pleasures.
- Helen Greenwood, Sydney Morning Herald
"In this wonderful cookbook-cum-literary memoir, novelist Charlotte Wood evokes memory and emotion as she explains why she loves to cook and what it means to her. Slotted in among the reveries are recipes as diverse as an Elizabeth David-inspired milk-cooked pork and the hedgehog slice of a childhood in Cooma. It's a book that's satisfying to mind AND stomach."
- SBS FEAST magazine
"Charlotte Wood writes so openly about her cooking habits and history and her thoughts about the ethics of good eating that it’s impossible not to be swept up in her enthusiasm. Novice and experienced cooks alike will find something to inspire them here, as Wood has included a range of wonderful, tempting recipes. Reading Love & Hunger is like being invited into Wood’s home, seated at a table crowded with delectable dishes and encouraged to eat until you burst."
- Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books
"This book has the power to reignite a passion for life, friendship, food and the everyday. Part memoir and part recipe book, Love & Hunger can be read cover to cover, as I did, just like a novel, or can be dipped into when the moment requires. Charlotte's unusual cook book is the wise friend many of us do not have ready at hand 24/7. Love & Hunger is a guide, an encouragement and an inspiration.
- John Purcell, Booktopia
"Love & Hunger manages to be a cookbook for the kitchen, a gentle read for the bedside table and a positive affirmation of the pleasure of cooking for family & friends ... This collection of 27 essays gently and sensitively explores the rich complexity and spiritual sustenance that good food with family & friends imparts to our lives. Each chapter explores, a different aspect of ‘the gift of food’ with a number of recipes ‘attached’; all of them good, none of them complex and many wonderfully comforting. There were many moments when reading, we nodded in heated agreement with the almost commonsense views espoused. As one other reviewer noted, it’s rare for a cookbook to move you to tears; be warned you may succumb. ... If there is a criticism to be made, we would only want more…"
- Tim White, Books for Cooks
"Author Charlotte Wood writes like a dream, wrestling with some of those common cooking conundrums, such as dealing with 'polenta paranoia', getting back your kitchen mojo and pondering just what the difference is between a chutney, a relish and a pickle. Her blog is also packed with scrumptious recipes - beetroot palak paneer, anyone?"
- MasterChef Magazine, June 2011
How to shuck an oyster
Great GW story Charlotte, and nice photo to kick it off, too. You looked so uncertain, so ‘first day at a new school’.
As an offal connoisseur, reading your story I felt a bit Homer Simpsonesque, drooling over ‘calf’s liver’ and all the other yummies just like Homey drools over deep-fried chicken with extra skin.
A really interesting article on a food that very few people know about today and yet it was so common when I grew up. I liked offal the way my mother used to cook it (Ox tail and heart, sheep’s brains and tongue – my favourite, liver and kidneys and the stomach turner, tripe), and at times wish it were easily available to make it now, the way she did.
Something that may alter the taste of offal of today from when I consumed it during the 60’s through to the 70’s is that stock are farmed differently and I wonder if that makes a difference.
In Italy, at least the south, have many Tripperia’s that sell only tripe and indicate that it is alive and well today in that part of the world.
I’ll admit to a few dry heaves while reading your vivid descriptions here, Charlotte, but it’s a great article and very thought-provoking, lingering in the mind like ammonia in the air…