Book of the Day Roundup: October 23-27, 2023
Polish’d
Modern Vegetarian Cooking from Global Poland
Michał Korkosz
The Experiment
Hardcover $32.50 (256pp)
978-1-61519-995-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Acclaimed food blogger and columnist Michal Korkosz’s Polish’d brims with dazzling recipes and inviting stories––virtuosic, vegetarian takes on traditional Polish cuisine with multicultural influences.
Organized by cooking technique, from raw to deep fried, the book features a generous blend of recipes. Some refashion Polish comfort foods like chilled chlodnik soup, pierogies, and dumplings, while others reflect a freewheeling integration of global flavors, from harissa to miso. Korkosz’s inventiveness with humble ingredients is demonstrated throughout, as with Roasted Parsley Root with Whiskey Jam, smoked twarog and mint, and Lentil Soup zipped up with toothsome layers of horseradish, smoked paprika, and roasted chickpeas.
Korkosz has a passion for transforming traditional Polish ingredients like cabbage and beets in unusual ways and for thrifty “stem-to-leaf” use of root vegetable tops and peels. Many dishes also feature bold and sophisticated color combinations, reflected in the luminous food photographs and vibrant graphics of the chapter dividers.
No Polish cookbook would be complete without a discussion of fermented and preserved dishes. There is a delightful array of pantry recipes, including various vegetable pickles, like fermented “sour candy” cherry tomatoes and ginger-spiced fermented radishes (these are married with pasta and walnut cream). The Polish dessert tradition gets the Korkosz twist with unexpected combinations of sweet and savory in baked creations and Caramel Plums on pillows of sour cream, kissed with candied hazelnuts and grassy rapeseed oil.
The book’s engaging stories about Korkosz’s kitchen experiences are as inviting as its recipes. He writes that cooking “felt like a prayer,” a sanctuary, a playground. He also imparts his playfulness and delight in culinary experimentation as he shares numerous tips and tricks to help home cooks achieve “restaurant-level” results.
Exuberant as a mazurka, Polish’d is a colorful introduction to fresh, innovative vegetarian cooking.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (August 27, 2023)
I’ll Be the Moon / Seré la Luna
A Migrant Child’s Story / Una historia de inmigración
Phillip D. Cortez
Mafs Rodríguez Alpide, illustrator
Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $18.95 (32pp)
978-1-68555-250-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A child treks across the Mexican desert with their mother, guided by the moon as they make their way to their father and to freedom. In poetic prose, the child muses on the moon, likening themselves and their journey to the celestial body. Deep blues of a star-speckled sky contrast with the golden arcs of the desert landscape; most pages are split in half by this dichotomy. Bold hope is the theme of this picture book, available in both English and Spanish.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (September 19, 2023)
The Berry Pickers
Amanda Peters
Catapult
Hardcover $27.00 (320pp)
978-1-64622-195-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
While working as migrants, a Mi’kmaq family is rent by their daughter’s disappearance in Amanda Peters’s decades-spanning, heartrending novel The Berry Pickers.
Even before Ruthie disappeared from the Maine field where her parents and siblings were gathering blueberries, six-year-old Joe had hints that the world was against his Indigenous family: people wanted to remove him and his siblings from their parents’ care to Christianize them; he and his family were treated with suspicion and disregard. The policeman asked to investigate Ruthie’s disappearance only confirmed this, refusing to even take a report. Ruthie would show up, the family was told. But weeks passed, and Ruthie stayed gone. Her family was forced to return to Canada; they could not be made to forget.
With her most solid memories beginning days after Ruthie’s disappearance, Norma grows up in outward comfort, though in a home shadowed by secrets. There are no photographs of her as a baby. She has dreams of another house and another mother. She does not know why her skin browns in the sun. She knows only that her mother is sad: following a string of miscarriages, Norma is the only child that stuck. A hole remains in Norma’s life into her adulthood, with no one willing to answer the questions that plague her.
Heartbreaking as it details two families’ open wounds—which, untreated or untreatable, continue to fester across the years––this is a novel about prejudice, unaddressed trauma, and the incalculable costs of concealing the truth. Its late developments are a balm, but not a cure; they speak to the endurance of family bonds—and to the significance of forgiveness.
Kept company by shadows and half memories, a hidden girl grows toward the family she lost in The Berry Pickers, a novel about the power of personal identity.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (October 14, 2023)
The Beauty of the Flower
The Art and Science of Botanical Illustration
Stephen A. Harris
Reaktion Books
Hardcover $45.00 (336pp)
978-1-78914-780-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Visually stunning and astonishing in scope, Stephen A. Harris’s The Beauty of the Flower is a history of botanical illustration that has all the makings of a classic reference text.
Hundreds of gorgeous images are used to trace the history of botanical art from the 1400s to the present. Harris addresses the artistry, accuracy, and intent of each illustration, including whether they are based on a specific individual plant or a stylized ideal. He notes that each artist’s choices and compromises reflected their era, audience, and scientific assumptions: “[Botanical illustrations] are points of transition, where the illustrator is the filter between a living organism and what we think we know about that organism.”
Dozens of historically significant works are profiled, including the Buch der Natur (1475), which was one of the first books to feature botanical illustrations as information rather than decoration; the massive Hortus Eystettensis (1613), which cataloged more than a thousand plants growing in a wealthy patron’s garden; and the Hortus Elthamensis (1732), considered one of the era’s most important books, which depicted rare and exotic plants growing in a royal apothecary’s garden. The Flora Graeca (1806-1840), considered a masterpiece of published botanical art, was so expensive to produce that only twenty-five copies were created; a leading botanist joked that “it is necessary to have the permission of a Cardinal” to even view the book. This comprehensive work also includes a capsule history of the printing process (impacting the quality and quantity of books produced), botanical expeditions (essential to the variety of species collected and illustrated), and plant-naming conventions (influencing the categorization of illustrations).
The Beauty of the Flower will delight plant-lovers and scholars alike with its magnificent illustrations and captivating account of the history of botanical study.
KRISTEN RABE (August 27, 2023)
Jewel Box
Stories
E. Lily Yu
Erewhon Books
Hardcover $26.95 (400pp)
978-1-64566-048-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The tales of E. Lily Yu’s brilliant, sparkling collection Jewel Box are fantastical, rich, and strange. They brim with imagination and insights and are diverse when it comes to geography and cultural details.
Here, inanimate objects take on wondrous life: a lamp post falls in unrequited love with a red-jacketed young man; a prayer rug delivers a pious Muslim to Mecca on hajj and then to Florida to see his son one last time. Anthropomorphism in the animal kingdom reveals human fallibility in subversive tales that take on the relationship between cartography and colonization: a wasp colony maps out provinces and conquers a hive of bees. Elsewhere, alien refugees challenge international diplomacy in a world skint of resources.
The prose is exquisite on a sentence-by-sentence level. Two great retold fairy tales—of Puss in Boots and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—are included; another story focuses on a maiden who ventures out to save her townspeople when their eyes are stolen by a magician. But it’s not all fairy tales: gaming, the law of physics, and Fermi’s Paradox wind through the collection, blending fables with science and adding intellectual layers to playful, sometimes laugh-out-loud stories.
The realistic stories in the collection are heartrending: a friend tracks down and captures a unicorn in Central Park, hoping that a miracle will save her friend from dying; an astronaut faces time dilation in deep space—and the impossible decision between continuing his mission or abandoning it to return to his wife. And in the most moving, gripping tale of all, a small monster struggles for survival, limb by precious limb, in a monster-eat-monster world, but learns that art and creative friendship trump Oedipal revenge.
Laugh, gasp, wonder, grieve, reflect: Jewel Box asks what enchantment is, even as it mesmerizes you and steals your heart.
ELAINE CHIEW (August 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
