A book all about food
Cathy Newland, Special to The Gazette
Friday, August 27, 2010
“The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove” by Cathy Erway, Gotham Books, 2010 $24.
A couple of weeks ago Sue Blechl wrote a review of a book I had read a few years ago, “Stuffed,” about a restaurant family in New York City. I loved reading that book about all the good restaurant food and the family life surrounding it. So it is a bit surprising that I chose a book to review that is about not eating in restaurants.
I will probably never love the stove. My idea of cooking is to throw potatoes in the oven to bake and chop vegetables for a salad. It was a really big thing a week or so ago when I tried making bread. Nevertheless, this book caught my fancy. I do love food.
And that is what this book is about — food.
Erway realized that she needed to do something to save money. She was a young [26 years old] working woman living in New York City. She determined that her “eating-out lifestyle was not sustainable.” At least it was not on her income at that time. She had to separate her needs from her wants. Buying food was a need; buying already prepared food was a want. But she also needed a motivator. Thus, a blog “Not Eating Out in New York.”
So for two years she rarely, very rarely, ate out and never brought home take out or fast food. She learned to bake no-knead bread, make ice cream, snag invitations to invitation-only supper clubs and to forage in trash dumpsters. And she wrote about it.
Her blog “Not Eating Out in New York” http://noteatingoutinny.com/ became popular with New Yorkers and food critics alike. “The site offered a fascinating potpourri of culinary punditry, practical cooking advice, social observation, and recipes that often featured a running commentary.”
I checked the blog as I was reading the book and writing this review. The featured recipe was for Peach Lassi — so timely since peaches are absolutely the most perfect, delicious food right now. (Have you visited The Orchard?)
Neither Erway’s blog nor the book is anti-restaurant. Rather they are about sustainable living through our eating habits. That means making better choices about what and how much we eat as well as how the food is prepared. The book is not a compilation of gleanings from her blog. It is instead a memoir - “one woman’s coming- of-age novel.” She shares all her experiences of the two-year experiment. And her conclusions are what many folks today share. In fact, Time magazine this month published an article about how seven “big-name chefs” are offering “meatless Mondays” or other such menus that promote a more “green” way of eating.
Erway’s book is another fine offering in the body of work on this subject that includes authors Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappé and Barbara Kingsolver.