With this stunning memoir of growing up in Italian-American New Jersey, Louise DeSalvo proves that your family's past is baked right into the bread...
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reviews
Nov 23, 2010
Louise DeSalvo writes about her complex relationships with food and family in “Crazy in the Kitchen.” At first glance, the book’s description: growing up Italian-American in New Jersey, appealed to me since it seemed to fit my own life. But her background is Southern Italy, North Jersey, while I’m the opposite. I’m also about thirty years younger than DeSalvo. Those factors, and a number of others, create a significant difference in our life stories. DeSalvo grew up with a depressed mom, an abus
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Oct 30, 2008
Kristen
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Every time we take our fall trip to the Hudson Valley, we stop by the Culinary Institute of America. This trip we visited the gift shop and I felt inspired to check out this book from the sale rack. It's about a woman who grew up in the 50s and 60s in suburban NJ with a mother who loved anything canned or processed and a grandmother from Italy who made "peasant food" and disdained the evils of Wonder bread and all the other food products of the time.
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Jun 23, 2011
Cathy
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3 1/2 stars. Not exactly what I was expecting. This memoir has more pain than pasta. DeSalvo grew up in a home without much love and there wasn't any affection displayed and the kitchen was often their battleground. Although there is no resemblance to my Italian American upbringing, I enjoyed some of the descriptions and dialogue that reminded me of my own Sicilian grandparents.
Aug 18, 2009
Gigi
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While I found this to be somewhat repetitive with DeSalvo's first book _Vertigo: A Memoir_ and other, shorter pieces of hers that I've read in journals and anthologies, midway through I began to feel really caught up in this family history. Especially gratifying were DeSalvo's descriptions of her food obsessions and quirks. I'm going to try to get my mother to read it now.
Dec 24, 2008
Julene
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I love this book. She tells the story of her immigrant family using food as the constant thread. It is a rich book that made me cry. I studied with Louise in NYC years ago (1980s) and it brought her alive as ever to read her memoir, she was right there with me as I read.
Apr 12, 2008
Kathy
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I quit reading this one about forty pages into it. The author grew up in an Italian-American family in the US in the fifties with her Italian grandmother living with them. I sort of expected a heartwarming story that would definitely have it's bittersweet moments but this one is pretty dark. Mom hides all the kitchen knives every night because she fears that any or all of the family members might wake up at night and stab everyone to death. Little sister eventually commits suicide. (I decided
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Jul 13, 2010
Denise
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Not exactly what I was expecting. I did not find it happy or uplifting as far as family dynamics.
Jul 20, 2009
Ruth
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All my aunts and uncles (6 of them, 9 if you count the steps) spoke with heavy accents, but growing up I never questioned why I never heard them speak either Sicilian or Italian, nor did anyone ever talk about their lives in Sicily or when they first came to Brooklyn. This book is not the story of my family, except in certain similarities of situation, yet in many ways it has helped me to understand the silence I grew up with. The silence I didn’t know was silence until long after I was an ad
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May 28, 2007
Jessica
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DeSalvo's gritty memoir is full of lots of unhappy memories of growing up as a 2nd generation American in an Italian American home in New Jersey. This is not a happy go-lucky foodie memoir. DeSalvo digs up a lot of pain in her family history.
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