Review
Original Review Date: 5/13/2008
======
Title: Saints Well Seasoned: Musings on How Food Nourishes Us: Body, Heart, and Soul
Author: Linda Hoffman Kimball, ed.
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 1998
Number of Pages: 208
Format(s) Available: Hardcover
ISBN: 13: 978-1573452885
ISBN: 10: 1-57345-288-2
Reviewed by Jonathan Langford for the Association for Mormon Letters
Review date: 5/13/2008
This is an odd little book, on a topic near and dear to my heart (and, I daresay, that of many Mormons): that is, food. If there’s a vice in Mormonism that is looked on with a certain degree of indulgence, it’s probably gluttony. We tell each other, you know, I really need to diet. And then we keep cooking and eating really scrumptious calory-laden creations, of the sort you’ll find (for example) at a great many ward potlucks.
This book is a lot like one of those potlucks, with 36 original dishes—er, essays—set before us by 30 cooks, in no particular order. The cooks are a diverse lot, though with a high incidence of published Mormon writers and/or BYU English professors. The recipes that accompany almost each essay are similarly diverse, ranging from bread and watermelon pickles to Indonesian fried rice and a “recipe for antidrowsiness on the road” from BYU English professor Steve Walker, consisting of “One stick Twizzlers strawberry licorice every twelve minutes” (pp. 103-104).
The common element is that each of these nonfiction essays deals in some way with the intersection between food and Mormon experience. As the editor writes in her Introduction, “Through [these essays] we see how food not only feeds the body but enhances community, passes on traditions, puts marrow in the funny bone, and connects us with each other and the Divine” (p. xiii).
For some reason, I find it particularly hard to review this book. One reason is that although the writing is consistently competent, I find that the collection as a whole falls largely flat. There’s a certain sameness to many of the essays. It’s a bit like 36 casseroles at a potluck: no matter the bits of pimiento and substituting cream of chicken for cream of mushroom, you can’t escape the fact that in the end, they’re all casseroles.
Maybe part of the problem is the intentionally “bite-sized” nature of the offerings, with no internal organization into sections: something that seems to have been a deliberate editorial decision, but that may have been a mistake. Or perhaps the problem is with my method of attempting to read the book straight through. Or it may be that I’m simply expecting too much from an anthology of this kind.
But the basic problem, I think, is that when it comes down to it, most of the writers don’t have anything worth writing an essay about—at least in the area of food and Mormonism. Many years ago, J. R. R. Tolkien, describing his goal in writing The Lord of the Rings, wrote: “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a . . . story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.” Any of these can be a worthy goal for an essay—but for the essay to work, it has to do something well: move us, excite us, tell a story, strike our funnybone, provoke our thoughts with a new insight or way of looking at things. In order to work, a personal essay has to be better than expected (especially when published in a more expensive hardback format). Few of these rise to that level—though I also have to report that my judgments of some of the essays have changed since I first attempted to read and review this book several years ago. So part of my objection may be based on reading conditions and context, as opposed to quality of the essays themselves.
I also found that attractive as the concept might be of linking essays to recipes, in practice it didn’t seem to work terribly well. Connections between essays and recipes are often tenuous, occasionally desperate, and in some cases nonexistent. Taken on their own merits, few of the recipes tempted me to go out and start chopping—and I’m someone who does, in fact, buy and read cookbooks for pleasure. Given that almost a quarter of the book is taken up by the recipes, that’s a problem.
A few essays stand out as particularly good. My favorites included the following:
- The Saturday Bakery, by Dean Hughes, about a fundraising project for a new church building that became a source of shared memories.
- Daddy’s Food, by Linda Hoffman Kimball, featuring reminiscences of Linda’s German-ancestry father, the delicious and disgusting foods he loved, and how he used to embarrass them while eating
- Ninja Pork Chops, by David Dollahite, describing the horrors of feeding a young family with 25-year-old, freeze-dried pork chops that had once been rejected by the U.S. Army
- My Sister’s Banquet, by Judy Dushku, telling of the comfort the writer’s terminally ill, less-active sister took in a tuna casserole from her visiting teacher
- Settin’ Pretty: Jan’s Red Jello, by Ann Gardner Stone, describing how “family” can become people we share important meals and holidays with over the years, even when they aren’t related
- Icebox Cake, by Elouise Bell, a delightfully humorous reminiscence about the weekly visits of the Iceman, and the icebox cake that was one of the few food items her father knew how to create
- A Year of Beans, by Natalie Curtis McCullough, describing a father and his newly adult son and the meal they take at a diner during the Great Depression
- Feijoada (American Style), by Orson Scott Card, describing the experiences of an American missionary who had been a fussy eater all his life but came to love both Brazil and Brazilian food
I also commend the volume’s excellent index, which makes it easy to find the recipes that interest you by listing them under (a) their given name (e.g., “Elder Hansen’s Brownies”); (b) their generic name (“Brownies”); and (c) relevant broad categories (“Cookies,” sub-entry: “brownies”).
So there you have it: a worthwhile effort with points of enjoyment, if not as good overall as I would have hoped. Worth picking up a copy if you like this sort of thing, but not a must-read.