Saturday June 27, 2015

Carole's Cookbook Picks:
I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci

I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti

Cooking is meditative, healing, and therapeutic. Giulia Melucci understands these curative properties of food and uses them in her memoir I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti as she shares her quest for love through the meals she cooks for her boyfriends. The variety in her cooking follows the variety in her men, resulting in entertaining accounts of her relationships with writers, hipsters, and the all-too-common men afraid of commitment.

What I love is that this book is seemingly deceptive. We open it expecting to be amused by the various horror stories of men at their worst (and for some their best), but we are surprised to see a clear narrative come through this disarray. It becomes a quiet reflection on what Giulia learned in the kitchen from her mom, teaching her that where men are absent, she will always have cooking, and she will always have herself. She learns through the process of love and loss that the peace and meditation of cooking remains.

Giulia represents all that Heirloom Meals aims to capture - a love of one's past seen through food memories, and taking those memories and tweaking them for our current lives - "savoring yesterday's traditions today." She emphasizes this from the beginning, where the book’s dedication states: “For my mother, who taught me how to cook and how to love.” I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti is a witty, self-effacing, often funny account of Giulia's love life and the food she cooks - for love, to assuage a broken heart, and for pure joy.