Salad Dressing Book

Some absolute moments of lyrical writing followed by didactic pretentiousness prevented me from giving the book the strongest rating. The book is organized literally in alphabetical order with an "A is for..." chapter title structure. Honestly A-F left me wanting, but as soon as I hit "G is for Gluttony", she lured me back in. (She queries that there is not a single person who hasn't stuffed themselves silly at one point just for the simple purpose of satisfying the "beastlike belly.") There is something genius about her writing (i.e., instead of calling a young boy a bully, she uses the phrase "knee-britched sycophant".) I respect the fact that she can devote an entire chapter to the enjoyment of freshly shelled peas. Or the fact that she pokes fun at affluent people who dress down their cooking in the name of "gourmet peasant food" calling it "rich-bitch deviation from a basically 'poor' recipe." Some of her aphorisms: every cook should cook saltless for a week to get back to the roots of food flavors, a grieving person will find respite by satisfying their bellies, that women deliberately use gastronimical pleasure to breed other forms of more wanton pleasure, kosher food laws were pragmatically rather than religiously developed, and that men's dislikes of food are usually because of other cognitive associations rather than the flavor of the food itself. Really worth a read if you're OK with the occasional letdowns in some of the individual essays.