Jessica Ruston

I’ve just finished reading this and it’s going straight onto my list of favourite foodie books that aren’t cookbooks (in with Anthony Bourdain et al).  I love a food memoir, or a chef’s autobiography, or any kind of narrative non-fiction related to food.  I especially love it in the winter, for some reason, because it’s comforting, I suppose, and when I’m in the kind of phase that I am at the moment, where my head is so full of my own novel-in-progress that reading any kind of sustained fiction is impossible and so I devour essays and magazine articles and books like this.

This is a picnic, really, of food-inspired vignettes from Laura Lockington’s life (a life which has clearly been full of thousands of escapades and stories which this book only really hinted at and which I was desperate to know more about).  From her childhood ‘farting around in the kitchen’ (this reminded me so much of my own childhood kitchen play, where I would spend happy hours ‘making mixtures’ from anything and everything in my mother’s cupboards.  Bicarbonate of soda for fizzing action was a must), to Sauce Vierge recipes from Italian prostitutes and the deep glamour of being whisked away to Paris for lunch as a 12th birthday treat by two dissolute Uncles, Lockington traces the outlines of her life through her love for food.

She is an honest, warm, and funny writer, and, perhaps most impressively, she writes about food with a lightness of touch that any pastry-maker would envy – not for her the heavy-handed, bossy and pious talk of a ‘passhun’ for food that so many seem to write with; instead, as with the best themed memoirs, she uses the food in her life as a springboard from which she paints deft pictures of her family, her friends, herself.  Cupboard Love would be an excellent stocking filler for any food-loving friend – here’s the amazon link.