Cookbooks
Kitchen Staycations
Covid-19 has grounded the world, but new
cookbooks provide sustenance for the
travel-hungry.
“We’re separated from the people we love and
the places we go,” says Leyla Moushabeck,
cookbook editor at Interlink, “and there’s a
sense of global loss that comes with that.”
Interlink, an independent family- and immi-
grant-owned-and-run house whose cookbooks
often spotlight underrepresented cuisines,
is one of several presses releasing wander-
lust-stoking cookbooks this season. Such
titles, Moushabeck adds, offer a way of
“celebrating at home through food and recog-
nizing places that are farther away.”
Traversing four continents and focusing on
cuisines that may be new to readers, these
books help home cooks travel without leaving
their stoves. continued on p. 24connections between community, hard-
ship, and food. Among her subjects are a
recent socially distanced cookout and her
Mormon ancestors’ End of Days food
preparations.
In The Book of Difficult Fruit (FSG,
Apr.), Kate Lebo weaves her personal
experiences together with recipes as she
reflects on unusual fruits, such as elder-
berry, sugarcane, or durian, and dis-
cusses their origins, history, and uses.
PW’s starred review called The Book of
Difficult Fruit “unusual and piquant,”
and recommends it for “readers hungry
for something a little different.”
The “difficult” fruits spotlighted in
the book, Lebo says, “became metaphors
for different experiences in my life in
particular, or in history or other people’s
lives.” Given the literary quality of the
book, the recipes “require a different relationship with the
reader,” she adds. Serving as illustrations of the essays, they
allow the reader to “enter the text and enact it.” ■