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Things to do
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Food-themed book clubs
Savory Book Discussion Group meets on the third Tuesday of each month, usually at the Fairport Public Library, 1 Fairport Village Landing, Fairport. The next meeting is 7 p.m. Feb. 16. The book that will be discussed is A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena di Blasi. Participation is free. For details, call co-founder Kathryn Hill at (585) 223-1646.
The Foodie Book Club is meeting at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 22 and 25 at Breathe, 19 S. Main St., Pittsford. The book to be discussed is Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Penguin, $15). The club is donation-based with proceeds going to the 2010 South Africa Seva Challenge. It will meet bi-monthly. Pre-registration is recommended as space is limited. Call (585) 248-9070. |
Just as everyone has an opinion about pie (what kind is best, should the crust be made with shortening, lard or butter, do you top it with ice cream or whipped cream), Nancy Rosenberg of Brighton and four other women also have very strong feelings about pie books and their authors.
Let's take John T. Edge's Apple Pie: An American Story, one of several pie-themed nonfiction books up for dissection with the Savory Books Discussion Group that meets at Fairport Public Library.
"He rambles. I don't know how this guy wrote for Gourmet magazine. That's maybe why they went out of business," says Rosenberg, perusing notes from her ink-filled notebook.
"I did enjoy his chicken book, but my impression is that when (Edge) started this book he thought he'd find the quintessential apple pie. He starts looking for it but doesn't find it, so he ran out of steam and interest," adds Mary Rafferty, a Pittsford reader who gives Apple Pie its second thumbs down.
Savory Books, which heads into its second season, could be dubbed a book club with appetite. Whether nonfiction, memoir, cookbook, history or travel tome, all of the titles chosen orbit around food.
"I especially get a kick when people talk about the foods they ate growing up," says Mary Pat Whitman of Perinton.
The group is a spinoff of a previous foodie book club that operated out of the Pittsford Community Library. When that Saturday morning group dwindled, Whitman and Kathryn Hill of Fairport decided to start a similar club.
"It's a small group and everyone participates to varying degrees. Sometimes a book that isn't good engenders a discussion that is," Rafferty says.
As facilitator, Hill spurs conversation with questions such as "What is your favorite comfort food?" or "What notable person, dead or alive, would you invite to dinner?"
Clearly, keeping talk limited to the book subject is not mandatory; Savory Books does not even require attendees to have read the titles, which are chosen by consensus, and by whether they are available through the Monroe County Library System.
Whitman didn't get around to the pie titles. But she did enjoy Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro.
In it she learned that the early cake mixes contained dried eggs. Housewives felt guilty that they were only adding water, so companies reformulated their mixes to allow consumers to crack their own eggs. Sales blossomed.
"Women felt like they actually did something," laughs Whitman.
Oh, and then Savory Books turns the table to food itself.
While Rafferty reads a passage from Edge's Apple Pie, Hill pulls out a coconut pie. She cuts everyone a slice.
Food-themed book clubs exist through libraries or other public venues in Pittsburgh, Birmingham (Ala.), Buffalo, Brooklyn and Seattle as well as in the blogosphere. More exist in Rochester as well.
Breathe, a yoga studio and juice bar in Pittsford, is launching one called the Foodie Book with a Feb. 22 and 25 discussion on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.
"Even as a dietician, my formal training didn't encompass much about the food industry, agriculture and where our food comes from. So that fascinated me in terms of the books I read," says Breathe nutritionist Lauri Boone, the group's facilitator.
The group will meet every other month.
Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, the 2006 bestseller that scrutinizes the industrialized food system, has been inspirational for many book clubs, food-themed or not, as has Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, the Barbara Kingsolver book chronicling her clan's experiment in eating exclusively foods grown close to home, says Fairport librarian Brenda Deever.
So too have culinary mysteries such as the Joanna Fluke series, which includes Plum Pudding Murder and Candy Cane Murder, and culinary memoirs, such as Ruch Reichl's Tender at the Bone, says Pittsford Community Library's Rhonda Rossman, who spearheaded the now defunct Pittsford group.
