Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook

by Patty Kirk

A captivating memoir from a cook who's traveled across the globe cooking, tasting, and enjoying good food. Patty Kirk has always loved eating it, cooking it, sharing it, talking about it. At six, she scrambled the last of the family's vacation provisions over the camp fire and concocted a delicacy-eggs with bacon and onions. Overnight she became the family cook and discovered a lifelong passion for cooking that accompanied her through decades of roaming and finally to the farm in Oklahoma where she now lives. Starting from Scratch narrates Kirk's wanderings in the U.S. and abroad from a culinary perspective, sounding the spiritual, political, and emotional depths of Brillat-Savarin's famous observation, "Tell me what you eat; I'll tell you who you are." In this candid and engaging food memoir---complete with recipes!---good food beckons from the past as well as the surrounding us, eluding us, drawing us, defining us.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Patty Kirk is the author of "Confessions of an Amateur Believer" and subsequent books on topics ranging from food memoir to her lifelong struggle to sense God’s presence. Raised in California and Connecticut, she spent her early adult years abroad and now lives on a farm in Oklahoma and teaches writing just across the Arkansas state-line at John Brown University, where she is Associate Professor of English and Writer in Residence. She and her husband, Kris, have two college-aged daughters, Charlotte and Lulu. Patty's passions are cooking, gardening, watching birds, and running on the back roads.

Reviews

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The whole time I was reading, I kept wishing that my mother or grandmother had written a book like this- a chronicle of their whole lives' worth of food, along with recipes. Such a treasure that would be!

[TAMMY CUEVAS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever been happily wandering through the bookstore when, suddenly, a book you have never heard of, written by an author you have never heard of, catches your eye and you know you have to have it? This is how "Starting from Scratch" came to be mine. This book, part memoir/part cookbook, has been one of the most enjoyable reads I've experienced in a long time. I couldn't put it down, yet I wanted to stop and savor it like a good meal.

The way the author remembers and shares her food memories resonated with me on a very personal level. When she talks about the foods cooked and eaten by her family during her childhood, I was reminded of the '70s-style foods from MY childhood. As she shared her food memories from her travels, I remembered foods that I have discovered while traveling. When she discusses the difficulty of replicating lost recipes, I thought of the foods cooked by my grandmothers that I can't quite duplicate today. In short, this is a book, written by someone who has a deep respect for food, to be enjoyed by those of us who share her relationship with food.

If I had to describe this book with one word, it would be....delicious.

5 stars

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't figure out why I didn't love this book. I love to hear about someone's travels to other countries and the food they eat there. Plus, it was full of recipes. Granted, not many I want to try but that is always a plus. smh Her times in Germany were my favorite parts.

[Sheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had a hard time relating to this author. In one sense I understood her longings and yearnings for a place she could live in peace and feel understood -- but that you could find that place via travel, particularly via travel to other countries, never even remotely crossed my mind. At one point she says that she struggles to fast from food, and the longest she's gone is two days -- I once "fasted" when I simply forgot to eat for four days (I was living alone and working on a project...).

Basically, the author is much more attuned to the physical world than I am. I read these sorts of memoirs, in part, because I enjoy people describing their appreciation of food I probably wouldn't even like, so in one sense I appreciate our differences, but I expect it contributes to my frequent feeling that "she's missing the point." While looking for a physical solution to a more spiritual longing is a clear example of that particular difference, some of the other times I was scratching my head, not so much.

In her "Rice" chapter she contrasts her beliefs to her "capitalist" husband's -- but the position her husband holds is not capitalist. Capitalism, to use the Mirriam-Webster defintion, is "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market." But the position her husband holds is that the US government has the right to try to bully the Japanese into buying American rice. As soon as the government starts telling people what they should buy, that's no longer capitalism in any meaningful sense of the word.

I was also surprised that she claimed Americans don't eat rice. She lived in New Orleans for a while -- did she never run across Red Beans and Rice or Dirty rice or Hoppin' John or Shrimp Creole? As mostly a midwesterner, I never ran across any of those until I was an adult, but Glorified Rice and Rice Pudding were staples at pot lucks, while we had plain white rice (with salt and a bit of butter -- how much butter varied depending on whether mom was dieting!) as a side dish all the time, and ate a lot of it. She claims the American rice she's cooked "is always either mushy and thin-tasting, or else dry and hard in the middle. There is no sticky and fragrant medium." I don't know that I'd call American long grain rice "fragrant" (although my middle daughter loves the smell of it cooking), and it's not as sticky as short-grain, but cooked right it's great stuff, soft and fluffy and a bit clumpy, but not mushy.

Another time I thought she missed the point is in her search for every day recipes from days gone by. While you do find those occasionally at Barnes and Noble (I picked up my first Jane Watson Hopping cookbook there), many of the recipes my mother and grandmothers cooked are in the early Betty Crocker cookbooks (before General Mills was selling boatloads of mixes), and some of my favorite old-timey recipes are out of cookbooks I got at museum gift shops. That's where I finally found a cornbread recipe that uses bacon grease and is baked in a skillet and tastes like what I got at friend's houses in the south (from Barbara Beury McCallum's "More than Beans and Cornbread," which I picked up at the West Virginia state museum shop).

At any rate, despite my frequent head scratchings over, "She is totally missing the point" kind of stuff, I generally enjoyed the book. And she does get something I think is key about American cooking -- "in America... the national cuisine is not a creation of restaurants or renowned chefs but is found only in the sacred intimacy of the family at home."

[Kandis Aggen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my bookclub, otherwise may not have read it. But that's why I love bookclub! This was not a page turner, but a nice change from my regular selections. The recipes are fun and we will be trying some at our bookclub review - should be fun. Patty has a fun way of looking at life through food.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love to read about cooking and an author's personal history with -- and approach to -- food. This book's lovely; bought myself a copy and mailed one to my favorite aunt at the same time.