- February 15, 2022
RE- SCHEDULED FOR NOVEMBER 3, 2022 AT 4PM Author’s Talk, The Secret Life of Recipes
with North Hill Resident and author Lynn Bloom
Monday, MAY 16 | 4:00 PM
Food is hot right now. Everybody is talking about food, in restaurants, in kitchens, in blogs, over the dinner table. The Secret Life of Recipes, based on Lynn Bloom’s just-published Recipe, spices up the conversation. Recipe is not a cookbook, but an examination of the social and cultural aspects of recipes. The public life of a recipe lives in specific instructions on how to prepare the actual food, its GPS directions, the best route from start to finish. A recipe’s secret life, much more interesting — as secrets always are — is to provide more subtle guidelines: the byways and scenic routes for nourishing body, spirit, and self-identity; family and friendships; tradition and innovation; culture, creativity, commerce, and competition
Any recipe worth its salt will stimulate the mind and the imagination as well as the appetite, as we’ll see as Recipe spills secrets from soup to dessert, with emphasis on comfort foods, Thanksgiving, food insufficiency and ta-daa—chocolate! “I would give up chocolate, says Bloom, but I am not a quitter .”
Lynn Z. Bloom is a professional author and a passionate home cook. Her first book—of 22 was a biography of Doctor Benjamin Spock, author of Baby and Child Care, America’s major child-rearing manual in the 1940s-70s. His advice, “If you don’t write clearly, someone could die,” was Dr. Bloom’s mantra as Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, where she taught autobiography, creative nonfiction, and women writers courses, 1988-2015. She has directed writing programs at universities north (Butler U), east (UCONN), south (William and Mary) and west (U of New Mexico) and taught writing in locations as diverse as Martha’s Vineyard, Florence, Italy, and New Zealand. She has written extensively on ethics, writing, travel, and food. Bon appetit!