Love and Hunger in Aussie Readers

Apr 29, 2012 Shelleyrae at Book'd Out rated it really liked it

Shelves: provided-by-publisher, aussie-author, nonfiction

Charlotte Wood's Love & Hunger combines delicious yet simple recipes and cooking tips with philosophical and personal ruminations. It is easily read from cover to cover but then deserves a place amongst your shelves of recipe books, to be pulled out frequently when looking for menu inspiration. Charlotte derives great pleasure from cooking and this book is infused with her passion, but rather than preaching about the correct steps and right tools, Love & Hunger is a conversation about food and c
Charlotte Wood's Love & Hunger combines delicious yet simple recipes and cooking tips with philosophical and personal ruminations. It is easily read from cover to cover but then deserves a place amongst your shelves of recipe books, to be pulled out frequently when looking for menu inspiration. Charlotte derives great pleasure from cooking and this book is infused with her passion, but rather than preaching about the correct steps and right tools, Love & Hunger is a conversation about food and cooking.

Love & Hunger encourages an approach to meals that considers food not just merely as fuel for the body but also as a form of nourishment for the mind and soul - from the satisfaction of learning a new skill, like making pastry, to the kindness in providing assistance in times of crisis. Wood urges simplicity and generosity over complicated, intricate dishes and the beauty of fresh ingredients. That is not to say she derides creativity, for she encourages experimentation with ingredients and methods as a way to promote confidence in skills.

The recipes Charlotte shares are varied and include tempting snacks, sides, main meals and deserts. Basics are demystified in chapters like 'How To Roast a Chicken' and the provision of an 'Essential Ingredients' list. Legumes and vegetables are featured quite heavily but there are also recipes for standards such as spaghetti bolognese and Chicken Marbella. The index is sorted both traditionally and by main ingredient so it is a simple task to find a recipe and blank lined pages invite you to add your own notes.

While the recipes are a feature of Love & Hunger, it is Wood's thoughts on food and cooking that makes this much more than a cookbook. Wood writes wonderfully of the way in which food promotes the bonds between families and friends. The ways in which we celebrate with shared feasts, console with hearty dishes or comfort with a favourite meal. She talks of 'mercy meals' shared amongst mourners, relaxed dinners during during beach holidays and dinner parties amongst friends. She reminds us that food is a gift, that cooking should be a work of heart, rather than art, to be enjoyed by those who provide and those who receive it.

Once a month or so my husband and I host a barbeque for friends. Each couple contributes to the meal by bringing either salad, snacks or desert while I serve my own 'secret recipe' versions of fried rice and potato bake. It's always a wonderful night as the children run riot while we adults relax with few drinks to chat. Eventually the men fire up the BBQ (usually when the children start complaining of being starved) and us women gather in the kitchen (I know, terribly sexist of us) to toss salad, butter rolls and then lay out the dishes family style for everyone to fill their plates. As we gnaw on ribs and pass the tomato sauce around the table we talk, and laugh and share. I look forward to these Saturday nights, the food is simple but the ritual of preparing and cooking and eating gives us a reason to gather and helps to reinforce our friendships.

Love & Hunger is an inspiring book which offers something for both the accomplished and novice home cook. It is a reminder to take pleasure in food and cooking and a guide for renewing the joy in preparing and serving meals to loved ones. Love & Hunger will make the perfect addition to your own kitchen, and to the kitchen of those you love. ...more

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May 31, 2016 Kathryn rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, 4-stars, australian-authors, reading-list-2016

I have to confess that my motives for reading this book were not initially as pure as the driven snow. I originally borrowed it from the library because I needed a book written by an Australian author with a bright cover to satisfy the criteria for one of the challenges I was doing this year. And I realised, as I scrolled through my Australian author bookshelf on Goodreads, that most of the covers I could see (and admittedly there are sometimes different cover variations on the books I get from I have to confess that my motives for reading this book were not initially as pure as the driven snow. I originally borrowed it from the library because I needed a book written by an Australian author with a bright cover to satisfy the criteria for one of the challenges I was doing this year. And I realised, as I scrolled through my Australian author bookshelf on Goodreads, that most of the covers I could see (and admittedly there are sometimes different cover variations on the books I get from the library, but I couldn’t be bothered looking at all of the different options and then turning up at my library to find the book I wanted didn’t have the same cover!) looked fairly drab, muted, pale, or colourless. So I looked further afield and found this one, which sounded like it would interest me.

Once I started it, at first I was a little surprised as I expected more of Charlotte Wood’s attitudes and responses to foods and her observations or research of other people’s attitudes and responses - which we do get a little of (and there is more further on in the book), but in the first chapters there is more focussing on specific procedures such as how to roast a chook, or concepts such as regaining your mojo in the kitchen when you’ve lost the desire to cook. Which is all fine - just not quite what I was expecting!

I liked the author’s mention of how far we have come in culinary matters - pointing out that in The Commonsense Cookery Book, published in 1976, that out of 130 recipes, only three called for garlic - and in quite measured quantities - “three thin slices of garlic” for spaghetti bolognese!! I already had a mantra that garlic in recipes can normally be safely doubled, but if I’m referring to a cook book from the 1980s or earlier, I think I’ll increase that factor to at least 5 times as much!

I enjoyed her comparisons of cooking with writing and some of the associated quotes:
“What pleases me first as a reader is the feeling that I’m in completely safe hands - at times I think this is the aspect of reading that gives me the most pleasure of all; a writer’s control of their material, their effortless-seeming blend of form and content to create something seamless, something beautiful. It’s a kind of beauty that has nothing to do with the story itself, but everything to do with its construction."

And while I agree with a lot of the things that the author says about foods and cooking and our attitudes to all such things, I have to say - although perhaps I am on my own here out in the land of the food Philistines - that I still like apricot chicken when I have it on occasion, despite her statement that apricot chicken has been consigned to the “retro joke book”.

I am now interested to read Charlotte Woods' fiction books to see if her fiction writing style is as good as her nonfiction style! ...more

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Nov 10, 2018 Kate Forsyth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir, cookbook

Charlotte Wood is best known as the Stella-award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things, but she is also a brilliant cook and food writer. For quite a few years, she wrote a food blog called ‘How to Shuck an Oyster’ in which philosophical musings on the importance of food and eating were mixed with helpful tips on how to be a better cook.

Love & Hunger grew out of this blog, and is a warm, wise, personal and practical collection of essays, recipes and cooking advice. Charlotte shares her own ...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Bree T rated it really liked it

Shelves: library-reads, memoir, aww2013, food

I’ve talked before on my blog here about how I don’t really like cooking that much. I like the idea of cooking. I like finding things that I’d like to eat and cutting the recipes out of magazines, or whatever, for a rainy day. I buy cookbooks. But when it comes down to it, I don’t really like the creation process of cooking, especially with 2 young children underfoot. My husband works nights and I find the time between say 5-8pm the most difficult to get things done. The kids are bored, they’re I’ve talked before on my blog here about how I don’t really like cooking that much. I like the idea of cooking. I like finding things that I’d like to eat and cutting the recipes out of magazines, or whatever, for a rainy day. I buy cookbooks. But when it comes down to it, I don’t really like the creation process of cooking, especially with 2 young children underfoot. My husband works nights and I find the time between say 5-8pm the most difficult to get things done. The kids are bored, they’re hungry for their own dinner, they’re demanding attention. And I really hate the mess that cooking makes. Ok, the mess that I make when I’m cooking.

Luckily my husband pretty much loves to cook. Since I moved in with him nearly 7 years ago, I haven’t cooked more than probably a dozen or so times. I bake things, like cakes, biscuits, banana bread etc. But cooking a full meal? That’s his job. I just provide the inspiration. He eats everything so whatever I tell him I feel like, is what we eat.

It’s clear that my feeling on cooking and preparing food is almost borderline opposite to Charlotte Wood’s. An Australian author of such books as Animal People and The Children, this book Love & Hunger is part memoir and part homage to her love of produce and preparing it. It’s filled with simple recipes and handy tips like her idea of staples for any cupboard, fridge or freezer. In all honestly, Wood’s attitude towards food and cooking it is, in an ideal world, the one that I’d like to have myself. The passion and enthusiasm she has for good, local and fresh produce shines off the page and she infuses beautiful memories of her childhood and the people in it and how so many things revolve around food. Whenever anyone was sick, or had passed on, there were plenty of people who gathered around to provide nourishing meals for the family, a strengthening of friendship ties by a simple gesture to let the family know they were cared about and being thought of. So much of our lives revolves around food and the consumption of it that it’s possible to tie it into just about every major event in our lives and many minor ones. Be they good or bad, I carry so many food memories and the mere mention of some foods can have me desperate for another taste or in the case of beef stroganoff or chicken teriyaki, looking around for the nearest bathroom. Vivid memories of food poisoning courtesy of those two in my university dining hall will never leave me. I cannot see myself ever trying to eat any of those meals ever again.

I have to admit, I have relatively simple food tastes. I’m definitely never going to be the type to go to the latest Michelin starred restaurant and book some 12 course gastronomic feast. I’m virtually un-Australian because I don’t eat seafood at all. Even though I love looking through cookbooks, to be honest, a large portion of them I skim over because they do feature food I’d never eat. Whilst this book also features recipes for meals I probably wouldn’t eat (such as the sardines!) it’s the beautiful collection of stories that is contained within it that sticks in my mind. Wood has a fantastic conversational style of writing, like you’re two people sitting down to have a chat and she’s simply telling you a few anecdotes. People in these stories come to life – they’re all people that we ourselves might know, stories that everyone can relate to and bring up a reader’s own memories. This book was a celebration of love, family, relationships and friendships as much as it was an admiration and devotion to food cooked well and prepared simply. Wood herself admits she doesn’t “plate up”, a new fad since Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules rocketed to the top of the TV ratings lists. Now everyone wants to serve up their dinner like they’re at a hatted restaurant. Wood’s simple back to basics, all about the food dishes are diverse in ranges of difficulty but none of them really seem utterly too daunting for even someone like me to attempt.

I’m going to pass this one along to my husband for him to enjoy as well. It’s the type of book where a wide variety of people can get such a pleasurable experience out of it, whether you are passionate about cooking and food or not. And I definitely think that there’s a few things in there that will help us be more efficient with the food we do buy and with stocking our cupboards. ...more

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Dec 26, 2022 Kristin marked it as to-read

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