‘My Mother’s Kitchen’ is real comfort food – USA TODAY

Charles Finch , Special for USA TODAY 12:22 p.m. EDT April 3, 2017

by Peter Gethers

(Henry Holt and Co.)

in Memoir

Food is the art within reach, the art that all of us live with day after day. Everyone wears clothes and lives in rooms, but its nevertheless easy enough to be indifferent to fashion or architecture whereas its almost impossible to imagine a person without feelings about their childhood dinners.

Maybe thats why the food memoir is such a blighted genre, trading year after year in the same slender profundities about youth, comfort, warmth. Food is yes tied intricately to memory, linking us to previous versions of ourselves, to people weve loved. That single insight isnt enough of an excuse to write a book about it.

Luckily Peter Gethers has a better one: his mother. At the age of 53, Judy Getherstook a low-level job at a Los Angeles restaurant called Ma Maison,whose chef was a young whiz named Wolfgang Puck. What followed was an almost impossibly gratifying and successful second act to her life a savant in the kitchen, Judy quickly became Pucks close associate, a friend of Julia Child,and a presiding spirit at Ma Maison, where, just for instance, she taught Sammy Davis Jr. how to roll pastry dough.

My mother forgets nothing when it comes to food: not taste, not texture, not appearance,her son writes. Even into her 90s, after four different cancers and two strokes,she retained that gift, and after her second stroke, her son, an editor, television producerand author, sensing that their remaining time together was probably short, decided to recreate the dishes that mattered most to his mother.

They provide the structure of his book, My Mothers Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life (Henry Holt, 320pp., *** out of four stars).The recipes are all over the map, the family maids chocolate pudding side by side in the lunch menu with Joel Robuchons mashed potatoes.

Author Peter Gethers.(Photo: Tsuji/ Getty Images)

Each is an avenue into Gethersown personal memories of his family, which he tells in a funny, practiced, exuberant voice, a raconteurs voice. This is a happy book, which is less mundane than it sounds writers, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, are a disproportionately depressive lot, which means books in general may be less representative of the human experience than their authors think.

There are moments when that happiness blurs into hedonism. Gethers (The Cat Who Went to Paris) buys houses at random, drops names, eats truffles and steaks smothered in cheese, gulps priceless wine. He belongs to a traveling private club dedicated to the martini. This should have been a shorter book; the best food writers, like M.F.K Fisher and Laurie Colwin,knowing their subject to be inherently indulgent, understand how crucially a little acid can cut richness.

So no doubt did Judy Gethers, however, and her sons depiction of her merciless palate, quiet feminismand courageously resilient spirit give My Mothers Kitchena reliable homing signal when it verges on the frivolous. Its recipes may not change your life, but some dish has, somewhere along the line; if youre fortunate you remember who made it for you as clearly and lovingly as this book does.

Charles Finch is the author of The Inheritance.

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'My Mother's Kitchen' is real comfort food - USA TODAY