Extra Sauce
The Good, the Bad, and the Onions
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
In “this year’s must-read food memoir” (Los Angeles Times), chef and writer Zahra Tangorra chronicles the great meals and great loves of her life, reflecting on family, friendship, grief, and the solace that can be found through food.
“Delicious . . . For Tangorra, food is an expression of her wild and mysterious inner world.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A memoir that feeds both body and soul . . . lush, fearless, and tender.”—Ruth Reichl
Extra sauce is how I like my pizza and also how I fall in love. Extra sauce is for sopping, dunking, and licking off your plate. Licking off your fingers. It is a tiny demand for freedom and hedonism. Life has told you this is the amount of joy you get, and you say: That is simply not enough.
At twenty-two years old, Zahra Tangorra was trying on adulthood and attempting to find herself when a harrowing near-death experience stopped her in her tracks. It felt like a twisted version of a second chance. Who am I? she asked herself. What do I love? The answers started coming to her: Stuffed shells and giant meatballs at J&J’s, the Italian red sauce joint of her Long Island childhood. Her mother’s chocolate mousse pie and her father’s sweet and savory pea soup. The people, places, and experiences that made her her, the relationships both loving and fraught—they were all, for better and sometimes worse, inextricably bound up with food.
In this memoir that celebrates both the delicious and the messy in life, Zahra reckons with the adrenaline-filled highs and devastating lows of opening cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie and then closing it at the height of its popularity. From cooking her father his last meal and the unexpected yet beautiful things she found at the bottom of her grief to the relationships she couldn’t save through cooking, like her fractured family and the lover she had to leave in Tuscany, Zahra writes about the immense courage it takes to allow ourselves to be loved, extra sauce and all.
Told with uproarious humor and tremendous insight, Extra Sauce is for anyone who yearns to embrace their whole self, who loves with abandon, and who eats with gusto.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chef Tangorra debuts with an appetizing memoir-in-essays about love, loss, and lasagna. Growing up on Long Island in the 1990s, Tangorra was an insecure girl scarred by her parents' acrimonious divorce, who discovered during treasured restaurant dinners that food could be a "vehicle for magic." After surviving a near-fatal bus crash at 22, Tangorra recalls having a "fire and brimstone" moment that pushed her to open her own restaurant. That culminated, four years later, with Brucie, an Italian café in Brooklyn that became locally beloved for its lasagna even as it proved financially unstable. Throughout, Tangorra writes of food as a force that connects her to loved ones: she prepares a roast beef sandwich for her cancer-ridden father in hospice; at the Tuscan yoga retreat where she falls in love with a noncommittal man named David, she woos him by preparing spaghetti limone and other intricate pasta dishes. The dalliance with David doesn't last, but Tangorra's culinary passions prove a constant companion, and readers who get palpitations at the thought of making the perfect marinara will savor her reflections. It's a nourishing self-portrait.
