The Barbara Pym Cookbook
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Barbara Pym’s sister Hilary teams with cookbook author Honor Wyatt to bring together this mouthwatering collection of family recipes, memories, and anecdotes drawn from Pym’s diaries and letters, as well her most acclaimed novels
Straight from the kitchen of Barbara Pym, this winning cookbook delivers a delectable treat for readers who like their meals served with a generous helping of literary aplomb. Sharing favorite family recipes that Pym incorporated into her novels, The Barbara Pym Cookbook reveals how the author’s life intersected with those of her memorable characters. Inside you’ll find British classics such as steak and kidney pie, plum cake, sausage rolls, and toad-in-the-hole—dishes that Pym’s characters would often prepare for each other. Other treats, such as moussaka and risotto, reflect Pym’s fascination with Greece and Italy. Throughout, the recipes are interwoven with references to Pym’s novels; Dulcie’s musings on “love apples” from No Fond Return of Love accompany directions for tomatoes à la Provençale, for instance. There are glimpses of Pym’s personal life, too, such as her description of kipper pâté for lunch with Philip Larkin. The Barbara Pym Cookbook is a must-have for both budding cooks and Pym aficionados.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A treat for devotees of Pym, this literary cookbook assembled by the author's sister and cookbook author Wyatt offers a modest selection of recipes, adapted for the American kitchen, for foods mentioned in Pym's novels. Others, such as ``a bowl of groats, fragrant as a cornfield and intriguingly surfaced with little pock marks,'' were Pym's favorites. All are accompanied by prose morsels taken from the author's corpus. Plain English food is served in abundance: steak and kidney pie, potted ham, sausage rolls. Curiosities like toad-in-the-hole seem included mainly for amusement. Overly familiar ethnic recipes reflect Pym's fascination with Greece and Italy. The culinary strength of the collection rests in its ``sweets.'' Americans taken with the English tea ritual will find the fairy cakes, Sultana scones and rock buns delightful, while the treacle tart and gooseberry pie will appeal to confirmed Anglophiles. Respectfully yet whimsically presented, the recipes come to seem a genuine, if minor, part of Pym's oeuvre , where the ``small things of life,'' cooking among them, are reckoned ``often so much bigger than the great things.''
