When a friend crafts a knife with a handle wrought from the frame of a sixteenth-century oak bed, Warner imagines the "frolics, giggles or nightmares" of the generations who slept on the wood he now works with. He finds unlaboured poetry in the tools of the kitchen, the way a knife feels as if it has almost a quality of destiny in a hand it fits. There are moments of autobiography, including an oblique account of a painful divorce, acutely observed encounters with such creatures as hawker dragonflies, wild boar, voles, lamprey eels, butchers, socialites and fortune tellers. It is a book of landscapes and travel, vignettes, often comic, of a professional cook's backstage adventures. Instead, it is, I think, a commonplace book, a miscellany exploring a panoramic, personal experience of food in a life, from what food means in childhood and in parenthood, in lovers' beds and on deathbeds, food foraged on country walks, and elaborately sculpted in pretentious restaurants, eaten in despair and joy. Valentine Warner introduces this book of stories about food by telling us that even though it includes recipes, it is "not a cookbook. Stories about life and death, seasoned with recipesĢ56pp.
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