Licking the Spoon
A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she can remember, from her frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a devoted Martha Stewart's Entertaining disciple.
In Licking the Spoon, Walsh tells how, lacking role models in her early life, she turned to cookbook authors real and fictitious (Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, Mollie Katzen, Daniel Boulud, and more) to learn, unlearn, and redefine her own womanhood. Through the lens of food, Walsh recounts her life’s journey-from unhappy adolescent to straight-identified wife and mother to divorcée in a same-sex relationship—and she throws in some dishy revelations, a-ha moments, take-home tidbits, and mouth-watering recipes for good measure.
A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is the story of how—accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides—one woman learned that you can not only recover but blossom after a comically horrible childhood if you just have the right recipes, a little luck, and an appetite for life's next meal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freelance writer Walsh's memoir starts off with great promise. Her early family history includes both Cuban and Greek roots and foodstuffs as well as Irish alcoholic dysfunctionality. Passion for food and cooking, a constant during the author's broken childhood and adolescence, persisted despite several geographical relocations. Her initial steps toward selfhood included foreign travel and college along with romance sex and drugs. By the time the narrator moves to New York, the narrative devolves into a chronicle of various relationships, harder drugs, various jobs and therapy. Walsh meets a man whom she later marries and who fathers her two children, and after a final, post 9/11 move to New Mexico, they divorce and the narrator remarries, this time a woman. Long-buried family secrets and eating disorders are part of overwrought memoir laced with vivid scenes and finished with.
