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On the 100th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth, Craig Boreth gives the reader a tour of the author's taste buds in
The Hemingway Cookbook. With chapters titled "The Early Years," "Italy," "France," "Spain," "Key West and Cuba," "East Africa," and "Idaho," as well as the Hemingway Wine Cellar and the Hemingway Bar, the reader is assured of finding taste treats ranging from fried trout to fried gudgeon, from pork and beans and spaghetti to eland piccata. And everywhere in between are countless photos of Hemingway with and without beard, as well as with and without clothes.
Boreth's contribution to Hemingwayiana is in providing the connective tissue among all the various stations of the author's life, collecting all possible references to food and drink, and then ferreting out suitable recipes to evoke a similar pleasure. For example, in the 1920s Hemingway writes about a lunch with John dos Passos ("whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides"). The meal included Rollmops (a herring dish), Sole Meunière, Civet de Lièvre á la Cocotte (jugged hare), and Marmelade des Pommes. Boreth provides the recipes. The reader is left to wonder what the Montrachet 1919, the Hospice de Beaune 1919, and the bottle of Chambertin might have been like.
The Hemingway Cookbook reads like an anthology of postcards sent back from the author's life. The collected recipes are eccentric, as any collection connected to any individual could not help but be. It's like being handed a metal box stuffed with 3-by-5 recipe cards, all of them written in Hemingway's hand and gathered from one end of his life to the other. A curiosity, really. --Schuyler Ingle
From School Library Journal
YA-Hemingway's stories are rich in the description of foods and wines. In what can only be described as a labor of love, Boreth has written a book that brings to life the memorable meals that Hemingway so vividly delineated or was famous for. The cookbook is divided by the major periods of Hemingway's life, and readers will be able to sample the foods he ate in Italy during World War I, in Paris and Spain in the 1920s, in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 1940s, and, of course, on safari in East Africa in the 1950s. The examples range from the mundane (pancakes and coffee) and the exotic (Empanadilla de Pescado) to the absurd (Fillet of Lion and Eland Piccata). Boreth concludes with a discussion of Hemingway's favorite wines and recipes for re-creating his favorite mixed drinks. Snippets from many of Hemingway's stories place the recipes in their proper context. The instructions are easy to follow and are not beyond the capability of average cooks. A moveable feast.
Robert Burnham, R. E. Lee High School, Springfield, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
