A Well-Seasoned Appetite: Recipes from an American Kitchen

by Molly O'Neill

In A Well-Seasoned Appetite, Molly O'Neill intertwines more than two hundred recipes with smart, eloquent essays that celebrate in the fact that eating, like most intimate acts perfomred on human beings, has as much to do with the mind and spirit as with the body. She shows how, by cooking in harmony with the seasons, we can recover our natutral appetites--the particular desires and fine distinctions lately blurred by having all foods abundantly available all the time.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Christy Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part meditation on the seasons and food and part cookbook of recipes and techniques, Molly O'Neill's A Well-Seasoned appetite has been in my cookbook collection for years, yet I still find pleasure in taking it out to peruse as the seasons change just as I do with some of my other books that are focused on seasonal or monthly pleasures, holidays and an awareness of what can only be best experienced in a given time of the year. There is an almost spiritual awareness for me in such. A pear will always taste best in the autumn as will a pot of root vegetable stew even if one can make them in the midst of summer with produce from the world over. Asparagus in spring tastes of fresh and green and the world around while asparagus in fall, perhaps still tasty, will not have quite the same resonance.

I pull out O'Neill when the seasons change and I'm feeling reflective, considering how my fruit bowl or soup pot may reflect what is going on around me. This call to cook with the seasons may have become a cliche catchphrase for restaurants and a marketing line at this point, but I believe it speaks to something deeper within us and resonates with our own rhythms so I will return again and again to such inspiration for my kitchen, my plate, my home.

[Kbg503 · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the recipes are more for reference or inspiration. I love her writings on seasonal ingredients.