Hello and Welcome to the Lost Friends Literary Club newsletter!
My deepest apologies for making you wait two whole days later than usual for this newsletter, but I needed a few weeks where I didn’t have to use my brain outside of business hours and anyways, this is my party! I’m the boss! I can do what I want! (Thank you for humoring me.)
If you've looked at past newsletters or you've been here since the beginning, you may have noticed that in addition to book news and reading materials, I read and share a lot about food. I went to culinary school and I love to eat, and through out my life the two things I’ve loved most have always been food and books… it should come as no surprise that I like to read about food, and that I buy cookbooks nearly as often as I buy novels. I thought I'd take an opportunity to share the intersection of the two, since this isn't just a club for people who love words, but one for those that love learning, and reading, and experiencing something different from themselves, and sometimes that comes in the form of new foods and new recipes.
One of my favorite things about cookbooks (and one of the reasons I seek them out as often as I do) is that they’re a fantastic hallmark of certain times and places. They can be specific to restaurants and cities, or families and Junior Leagues, easily found in thrift stores and bookstores alike, frequently with recipe addendums written in the margins. Cookbooks are an oddity in that they encompass so many things at once; how often do you find a medium that contains instruction manual, memoir, visual art, and family heirloom? They connect us to each other, in a way that I think even the most beloved of books doesn’t really do- the mere act of of cooking something from your favorite cookbooks is a near linear emulation of the author and the people that have used the same book before you.
My most used cookbook this year has been Nothing Fancy from Alison Roman. Roman’s writing is honest and brash, but her recipe intros contain tidbits of stories from times pre-COVID, when dinner parties didn’t feel like a super spreader. I miss that, and every single time I open the recipe for “Overnight Focaccia, Tonight,” I think about the friends that sat in my living room and ate pizza straight from the pan while watching a Super Bowl that we didn’t actually care about. While I love the mystery of a tricky plot and the familiarity of an old book, no book that I’ve ever read reminds me of tangible moments with my people quite like my favorite cookbooks do.
In that same vein of remembered friends, my most recently purchased cookbook was an attempt to recall the people that are gone: my great grandmother lived in Slidell, Louisiana, when I was little and to this day, her crawfish étouffée is still my all time favorite meal. When Mosquito Supper Club was released, I broke one of my own rules and bought it without flipping through it first because the mere description of the LA bayou reminded me of her. The book is beautiful, although a little more intense than I typically like in a cookbook with explicit instructions on how to how to kill your seafood and who to buy it from.
The point I’m trying to make is that, while often thought of as a world separate from the book industry, cookbooks tug just the same emotional strings as many of our favorite books. They fill the same voids in us, the ones that come from a desire to learn and experience new things, and connect us through reading and consuming (although with food instead of prose).
Butter Beans in Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman. I am wholly of the opinion that the best cookbooks are messy cookbooks.
Fall is an especially lovely time in cookbook world where publishers are just promoting new titles left and right for the upcoming holiday season. One of my favorite newsletters, Stained Page News did a fantastic fall cookbook preview that I highly recommend as it breaks down basically every cookbook coming out in the next few months. I can promise you that you will not find a more comprehensive preview of everything the fall release season has to offer.
Personally, I am most looking forward to Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz (a former Bon Appetit star for her Gourmet Makes videos), The British Baking Book by Regula Ysewijn, and Modern Comfort Food by Ina Garten. I’m not typically drawn to the Barefoot Contessa but her quarantine vibes have been fabulous and honestly, we could all really use some comfort food this year.
A very hungry reading recommendation:
COVID and the ensuing feelings of isolation have brought forth a resurgence of community-sourced cookbooks. This NYT article really goes into great detail about the beauty of coming together for this type of community project in a time when we can’t actually come together. For some examples of COVID cookbooks to check out, I’d recommend:
The Quarantine Cookbook (donation required)
COVID COOKBOOK (donation required)
This week in book world news:
The Booker Prize announced its shortlist of finalists for 2020. The Booker Prize is annually awarded to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. Obviously all of the books on that list are superb, but I’m especially excited about Real Life by Brandon Taylor.
The National Book Foundation announced its longlist for the National Book Awards, which is an award for the best writing in the US. The NBAs cover multiple genres like fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translated literature.
5 things I read this week:
The comments on our NEW THREAD for reading recommendations! If you’ve ever read and loved a book, wanted to shout it from the rooftops or whisper into the interwebs, here is your chance! This thread is free and open to anyone who wants to comment or lurk, and I’d love for you to share it with others.
What Makes a Waif?, a profile of the writer Maeve Brennan in the London Review of Books. I’d never heard of Maeve Brennan but in an attempt to clear out the 88 tabs I have open in my mobile Safari right now, I clicked on this and love love loved it. I do not know how or why it came to be open in my browser but it was beautiful. Read on for sass and fashion.
This fictional party invitation that made my heart explode in both happy and sad ways. Emotions are so FUN.
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia which was more about the area the murder took place in than the murder itself. Even so, I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot about West Virginia which is the poorest state in the US for a lot of reasons. Highly recommend for those interested in societal examinations and culture.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's obituary in the New Yorker.
Our vocabulary word for this week:
It’s feeling like Fall here in Asheville, which means I’m drinking hot tea and rewatching Gilmore Girls for the umpteenth time. In season one, there’s a joke about a woman being “the most odious woman alive” and while I’ve always enjoyed that, I didn’t actually know what it meant. Thus, our word this week is odious, which is really just a slightly more interesting way of saying that someone/something is easy to hate. It’s an adjective. Let me know if you use it in a fun (snarky?) way.
Last thing before we go:
I don’t plan on this being a recurring event in the ole LFLC dispatch, but its on par with this week’s topic so here it is: small, independent bookstores are struggling just like the rest of us right now, and a particularly delightful one put out a call for help this week. Kitchen Arts and Letters is a food and drink focused bookstore in NYC that is in need of a boost. If you have a few bucks to spare, please consider checking out their online store or contributing to their GoFundMe. They sell new and used, out of print and hard to find cookbooks, with over 12,000 titles in stock. If you’re planning on buying cookbooks for Christmas, maybe give them a call?
As always, thank you IMMENSELY for reading this far. If you enjoyed this dispatch, please send it to every single person you know, and then send it to like, three more people. You can follow our socials at the buttons below, and you can find every book I recommend in the newsletter on this Goodreads shelf. If you want to chat, ask for book recommendations, or correct my punctuation, you can reply directly to this dispatch or leave a comment on substack, where you can also find an archive of every dispatch I release. Thank you for reading!