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322nd out of 587 books
—
404 voters
My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes)
by
Luisa Weiss
The Wednesday Chef cooks her heart out, finds her way home, and shares her recipes with us
It takes courage to turn your life upside down, especially when everyone is telling you how lucky you are. But sometimes what seems right can feel deeply wrong. My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused, kitchen-maid perfectionist broke off her engagement to a...more
It takes courage to turn your life upside down, especially when everyone is telling you how lucky you are. But sometimes what seems right can feel deeply wrong. My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused, kitchen-maid perfectionist broke off her engagement to a...more
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published
September 13th 2012
by Viking Adult
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The publisher states this is a good read for those who loved JULIE AND JULIA and I agree. A memoir about a woman who returns to her home town of Berlin to make a new start. She was inspired by Little House on the Prairie books which always warms my heart.
Nov 29, 2012
Chris
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommended to Chris by:
Kats
Shelves:
food-essays-memoirs,
2012-reads
All I needed was a fabulous food memoir to break me out of my book slump. And a love story to boot! THIS is what a food memoir should be like! Think Laurie Colwin, David Lebovitz, Gesine Bullock-Prado, Elizabeth Bard--all great food writers whose memoirs I loved. Weiss takes us along the path of her divided childhood--Brookline, Massachusetts and Berlin, Germany--and the food memories that went along with that. She sometimes quickly fast forwards through parts of her life, but stops in parts whe...more
3 likes · like · see review
This was one of the better written food memoir books. It would have been interesting to better understand why she moved to the U.S. with her father when she was three, rather than staying in Berlin with her mother. Most mothers wouldn't let their ex-husbands take their children to a foreign country, so I wonder what was going on there.
She also seems to want to move back either to the U.S. or to Berlin every few years, which makes me wonder if, in a few years, she is going to tell her husband sh...more
She also seems to want to move back either to the U.S. or to Berlin every few years, which makes me wonder if, in a few years, she is going to tell her husband sh...more
Take one lady, born in Germany of Italian-American parents, who spent her childhood in both Boston and Berlin. Find one common, stabilising thing for her comfort and sense of home (the kitchen). Combine with a love of food and professional work as a cookbook editor and the end result is this memoir. There certainly has been less meritorious memoirs published so reading this is quite an interesting change!
Here is a fairly lengthy, detailed book that shares the author's relationship with food. Yet...more
Here is a fairly lengthy, detailed book that shares the author's relationship with food. Yet...more
I was eager to read this book before it came out because I thought it would be a modern German cookbook. How wrong I was! I'm not sure how to label this new sub-genre of chicklit (foodie memoir with recipes?), but for what it is it's OK. Very similar to 'I Loved, I Lost, I made Spaghetti' and many others like it. I guess Ruth Reichl really set the template with her autobiography, but Ruth is really an amazing writer.
Luisa is very likeable - she seemed like someone you'd want to be friends with....more
Luisa is very likeable - she seemed like someone you'd want to be friends with....more
6 likes · like · see review
This is subtitled "A Love Story (With Recipes)" and that's basically the gist of the book. But it's actually not just a love story in the traditional sense. It's the love she has for family and friends, the love she has for cooking (and for books!) and the love she has for her two hometowns---Berlin and Boston.
Obviously I connected to her love of books but I also connected to the way that she felt torn between her two selves, the European self and the American one. The only real problem with her...more
Obviously I connected to her love of books but I also connected to the way that she felt torn between her two selves, the European self and the American one. The only real problem with her...more
2 likes · like · see review
MY BERLIN KITCHEN by Luisa Weiss
"I was born in Berlin in 1977, back when it was still known as West Berlin"--so writes author Luisa Weiss in her memoir, "My Berlin Kitchen." That Berlin bore "the pockmarks from mortar fire in the façades of many buildings and the air smelled of coal smoke."
Three years after young Luisa was born, she and her father returned to Boston. For years, she traveled intermittently--spending “summers in Italy with my mother’s family,” and winters in Boston. At age ten, sh...more
**I recieved this book free through goodreads firstreads!**
There is something wonderful about getting to read a book before it's officially released....it's like being let in on a juicy secret! And this was a wonderful secret!
Firstly, let me say that I do not know how to cook. If it's not frozen with instructions on the box, I'm absolutely lost. But ironically I like to read about people who can in fact cook.
Luisa Weiss however, makes me WANT to learn how to cook. The way she weaves her memories...more
There is something wonderful about getting to read a book before it's officially released....it's like being let in on a juicy secret! And this was a wonderful secret!
Firstly, let me say that I do not know how to cook. If it's not frozen with instructions on the box, I'm absolutely lost. But ironically I like to read about people who can in fact cook.
Luisa Weiss however, makes me WANT to learn how to cook. The way she weaves her memories...more
3 likes · like · see review
I've reached a certain point of saturation with the blogs that I follow so I'm always a bit hesitant to add a new one that seems already a bit established, versus the kind that I've been able to enjoy watching grow over time, if that makes sense. After finishing this memoir with recipes though, I immediately went and added The Wednesday Chef to my Google Reader--I'm sad to have missed out on it for years! I thought this would be mostly recipes with some personal stories, but it's actually the ot...more
Oh dear, I wanted to like this book, which, like A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table is a memoir by a food blogger writer. Sadly, although both books cover similar territory--a memory, a recipe, a wedding--this one deeply lacks Wizenberg's sense of humor and light touch, and this author spends much of the book wringing her hands over one decision or another. I found her level of anxiety off-putting and felt that her life story was being told a bit prematurely before much h...more
Who should read this book:
1. People who like to cook
2. People who like NYC
3. People who like Berlin
4. People who like the Italian countryside
5. People who wish they could live in Paris, even if just for a little while
6. People who like happy endings
7. People who don't mind a little navel-gazing in the pursuit of a narrative
8. People who do not appreciate how fortunate we are to be able to get collard greens, chile peppers and tamarind sauce in just about any grocery store here in the US
9. Peopl...more
1. People who like to cook
2. People who like NYC
3. People who like Berlin
4. People who like the Italian countryside
5. People who wish they could live in Paris, even if just for a little while
6. People who like happy endings
7. People who don't mind a little navel-gazing in the pursuit of a narrative
8. People who do not appreciate how fortunate we are to be able to get collard greens, chile peppers and tamarind sauce in just about any grocery store here in the US
9. Peopl...more
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Luisa first became known to the world as a cooking blogger. Knowing her history, I was expecting MBK to be a sort of Julie and Julia meets Eat Pray Love. In Julie and Julia, a young woman living in New York, Julia Powell, tries to cook every dish in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a tiny kitchen in 2002, and she blogs about her results. In Eat Pray Love, a young travel writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, tries to recover from her divorce by travelling to Italy, India, and Indonesia....more
Luisa Weiss was born in West Berlin to an American father and an Italian mother, so her cultural identity was always in question. After her parent's divorce she grew up going back and forth between Berlin where her mother lived and Boston where her father lived. Luisa always loved food and was exposed to so many different cuisines because of her constant traveling and living all over the world. She started collecting recipes and cookbooks for when she "got around" to trying them all out. After c...more
Just to get this done up front, the weakest part of this book are the recipes. Each chapter ends with a recipe or two for dishes pertaining to the chapter, and this is fine, but you are not going to get the breadth and interest of a book that is a cookbook. I got this book primarily for the memoir, which I enjoyed, but I was surprised to really have no interest in cooking any of the recipes.
The memoir was charming, and Ms Weiss manages quite well not to become too sentimental or melodramatic. He...more
The memoir was charming, and Ms Weiss manages quite well not to become too sentimental or melodramatic. He...more
This week I read My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes) by Luisa Weiss. Part memoir, part recipe book, I couldn't put this one down. I've even already tried a couple of her recipes, and they are fantastic, too. Luisa is the author and creator of the popular The Wednesday Chef blog. I love how Louisa decided upon her blog's name: It's in honor of the Wednesday food section in the New York Times. Luisa has spent years collecting recipes, many of the clipped from the paper.
Luisa has such an...more
Luisa has such an...more
(Rounding up from 3.5 stars.)
Lovers of food-bloggers-turned-authors will rejoice to read MY BERLIN KITCHEN: A LOVE STORY. The framework will be familiar to fans of the genre: chapters that serve as windows into the author's life, each one ending in a recipe or two. You would safe giving this book to any (female) foodie friend who enjoyed JULIE AND JULIA; EAT, PRAY, LOVE; MY HOMEMADE LIFE; and so on. It's also a pretty good bet for that friend in her 20s or early 30s, for whom the Big Decisions l...more
Lovers of food-bloggers-turned-authors will rejoice to read MY BERLIN KITCHEN: A LOVE STORY. The framework will be familiar to fans of the genre: chapters that serve as windows into the author's life, each one ending in a recipe or two. You would safe giving this book to any (female) foodie friend who enjoyed JULIE AND JULIA; EAT, PRAY, LOVE; MY HOMEMADE LIFE; and so on. It's also a pretty good bet for that friend in her 20s or early 30s, for whom the Big Decisions l...more
I'm a sucker for any combo of food + memoir, I must admit. I had read Luisa's blog on and off over the years, so I was curious to see how her story came out in a book. I liked that she seemed to tell more of a story than her blog did - so many times blogs turned into books are just the blog re-written. In this story, she filled us in on what happened in her relationships - questions I had (nosily) wondered from following her blog. I also enjoyed (and slightly related to) the experience of being...more
The 3 stars are more for the recipes and for Luisa Weiss's blog, "The Wednesday Chef," of which I'm a regular reader. I enjoy her writing in short snippets. In a full length memoir it was a little harder to take. I am not a nostalgic person, and a book where every city is filtered through the narrator's dreamy childhood recollections is a book that will, eventually, irritate me. She makes NYC sound like a meringue-whipped confection covered in fairy dust. It's not - NYC smells like sewage, peopl...more
OK, I realize I may not have been the target audience for this book. I enjoyed the read, but I have never read a book where so much of the storyline was dedicated to meal preparation and eating. Foo does have a big part of lives. We do need to eat every day. In a culture where we eat out too much, we loose our appreciation of what it takes to creat a great meal.
There were some aspects I liked. When she was living in Berlin, she talked about eating foods in season. Read the Hundred Mile Diet. I t...more
There were some aspects I liked. When she was living in Berlin, she talked about eating foods in season. Read the Hundred Mile Diet. I t...more
I won this book from GoodReads and am very appreciative. I really want to rate this a 3.5 but that is not an option and so will round up. Following Luisa as she decides what it is she wants out of life and where she wants to live was interesting. Since I love food/cooking, having the additional component of her love affair with food and ending each chapter with a recipe was an added bonus. When I think about the book, it is hard to describe why I want to give it a 3.5 rather than 4. All I can co...more
I am usually attracted to books dealing with identity issues, as far as different cultures and nationalities are concerned. This one falls exactly into that category written by a young woman born in Berlin, Germany to an Italian mother and an American father. She grows up on both sides of the Atlantic and is now searching for that feeling of "home". Well, when you add her descriptions of food and cooking, and a few recipes here and there, it makes for an interesting read.Her writing feels honest...more
There's nothing like a good memoir written by a good cook, and you'll get that (and more) from this wonderful lifestory of author (and owner of 'the Wednesday Chef' blog), Luisa Weiss. You'll be somewhat envious of her life; half American, half Italian; living with her father in Boston, and then visiting her mother in Italy or Berlin. But once you learn how hard it was for her, you'll suspend your envy. While Luisa does go through some hard times (i.e., heartbreak, loneliness), you'll cheer her...more
I have a fondness for cooking memoirs, some of my favorites from the past being Gesine Prado-Bullock’s “My Life From Scratch,” Molly Wizenberg’s “A Homemade Life,” and Nigel Slater’s “Toast.” My Berlin Kitchen is my most recent favorite. Weiss has lived in some interesting cities, Berlin, Boston, New York, Paris, and I enjoyed reading about her travels and search for the city to which she feels most at home.
Although I knew what was coming in her romantic relationship, I was rooting for her and w...more
Although I knew what was coming in her romantic relationship, I was rooting for her and w...more
I think this author probably does food blogging better than she does personal memoir. The recipes at the end of each chapter were the best part of the book- even though a lot of them were for things I don't see myself attempting anytime soon (roasted goose, elderflower syrup). She even managed to avoid, for the most pary, the condescending foodie voice that I loathe in many blogs and cooksbooks (eg. "For this part of the recipe, I use *insert exotic brand* of *insert exotic ingredient* which I b...more
I liked this memoir-cookbook much more than I was expecting to. I've read her blog for years and I thought, "I know this stuff, right?" But I didn't. This was all the stories that Luisa had left off her blog, had hinted at, but never shared on the pages of her strictly-cooking blog. It's great stories, a great saga of hunting after love and true happiness. When you read it, imagine a beautiful woman with thoughtful eyes and a wonderful voice writing it, because that's what Luisa is. I'm going to...more
This book was a Goodreads recommendation. I really enjoyed it; the author has a very easy and detailed way of talking about her life, the cities in which she lived, the people she meets and the food they all love. I especially enjoyed it because she makes a move to Berlin - a city I spent some time in during college, and she is moving from New York City - where my husband & I will be celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary next month. I also loved that at the end of every chapter the aut...more
**RECVIEVED AS FIRST READS GIVEAWAY**
Excellent. Inspired me to get back into cooking and the courage to cook for a large group.
I put off reading this because I was so looking forward to it and it did not disappoint! I had never heard of the blog or author before seeing this on the Giveaways page but I was cheering and connecting with the author throughout the book. A warm, approachable personality shines through the book and including actual recipes was awesome!
My criticisms are that as the cha...more
Excellent. Inspired me to get back into cooking and the courage to cook for a large group.
I put off reading this because I was so looking forward to it and it did not disappoint! I had never heard of the blog or author before seeing this on the Giveaways page but I was cheering and connecting with the author throughout the book. A warm, approachable personality shines through the book and including actual recipes was awesome!
My criticisms are that as the cha...more
Originally posted at Nose in a Book
This book made me so happy. I’ve read the author’s’ blog, The Wednesday Chef, for quite some time, so when there was a chance to get an ARC of her book My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story, I had to enter. I loved almost everything about this book. The cover, the writing, the recipes.
This is the story of Luisa Weiss. She was born to an English father, Italian mother, in cold war West Germany. She moves a lot between various countries and ends up taking a jump and...more
This book made me so happy. I’ve read the author’s’ blog, The Wednesday Chef, for quite some time, so when there was a chance to get an ARC of her book My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story, I had to enter. I loved almost everything about this book. The cover, the writing, the recipes.
This is the story of Luisa Weiss. She was born to an English father, Italian mother, in cold war West Germany. She moves a lot between various countries and ends up taking a jump and...more
I didn't know of this blogger or her writing prior to picking up this book, so I may have been in a better position than a reader/follower of hers. Weiss is skilled at placing the reader in the moment without being floral or wordy. I enjoyed reading about her life, her love of food, and her family. I especially enjoyed that each chapter ended with one or two recipes.
As someone who comes from a Euro-mutt family, I could sympathize with much of what she wrote and appreciated reading the thoughts o...more
As someone who comes from a Euro-mutt family, I could sympathize with much of what she wrote and appreciated reading the thoughts o...more
I loved this book!!! Combines 3 of my favorite genres - memoir, cooking, & travel. Don't let the title fool you -- not only does Luisa Weiss (The Wednesday Chef blog) write about her experiences growing up, living, & cooking in Berlin, she also writes about her experiences living & cooking in New York, Paris, Boston, & Rome. Her writing is so personal - you experience all her emotions as she moves through her life - joy, confusion, frustration, love of family & friends. Luisa...more
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Luisa Weiss was born in West Berlin and spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between her Italian mother in Berlin and her American father in Boston. She started her much loved and highly acclaimed food blog, The Wednesday Chef, in 2005, and has worked as a literary scout and cookbook editor in New York. She now lives in Berlin with her husband and son.
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“I couldn't will my beloved Berlin streets across the world or make the people I loved appear when I needed them, but by summoning the flavors of Berlin and the foods of my loved ones, my kitchen became my sanctuary, the stove my anchor.
Distance means nothing when your kitchen smells like home.”
—
2 people liked it
Distance means nothing when your kitchen smells like home.”
“The baker has to have not only strength and fortitude, but patience too.”
—
2 people liked it
More quotes…
Nov 25, 2012 02:06pm