Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food (Live Girls)

I really liked this collection of essays

This book has twenty-nine pieces written by different authors, covering all kinds of delightful ways of enjoying food and drink. The collection was meant to counteract all the diets and food trends and forbidden foods and celebrate women who love to cook and eat. Can't beat that!Some of the pieces even have a recipe or two at the end---everything from your basic martini to baklava.I especially enjoyed "Big Night (or Wound a Sicilian, Pay Through the Mouth)," about a Sicilian restaurateur who brought course after course until the author and her sister were so full they couldn't move. I also liked "Paddington's Marmalade, Jo's Apples," about a woman who wanted to eat the foods that were mentioned in her beloved childhood books.The piece on "Baking Boot Camp" really made me want to get in the kitchen and create stuff I haven't baked in a long time.I have to confess I did not read "After Birth." It made me queasy just looking through it.

Good for you! I am a big fan of anthologies, and this is one of the best put out by Seal Press. I particularly loved Amanda Sullivan's "My Mother's Kitchen," which so poingnantly caputures the part food can play in critical relationships. Screamingly funny with just the right touch of gross was Ayun Halliday's ode to working in a dive of an Italian place. Good work, Editor Miller. I'm off for a snack...

This is one of the better food anthologies I have read. The quality of writing here is so consistently good that I suspect the hand of an especially competent editor is involved.Among my favorite essays in this collection are Pooja Makhijani's School Lunch, in which a girl is embarrassed that her lunch box contains weird food, until a new girl comes to class. Also Camille Cusumano's Big Night, about a meal in Sicily that seems at first like heaven, until it turns aout to be quite the opposite. Rachel Fudge's remembrances of her parents' cocktail hour contrasts nicely with Christina Henry de Tessan's memories of family dinners in Paris.One essay even made me cringe, the repulsive After Birth by Alisa Gordaneer. Powerful stuff.