The Reporter's Kitchen: Essays Hardcover – November 21, 2017 by Jane Kramer (St Martin's Press) (IBRCookBooks)

The Reporter's Kitchen is a marvellous collection of Jane Kramer's even more marvellous food pieces. They are at once Proustian, saturated with memories, delightful, ironic, and humorous. Her portraits of famous chefs and less famous but wonderful cooks are irresistible. She is a master of the telling detail. She evokes tastes -- even those we have never in fact tasted that become memories so real that we forget we never really ate in Modena or Copenhagen or a Berber village. Kramer never lets us forget that eating is at its best a social occasion -- ritualistic, celebratory, and joyous -- and that cooking is not just following a recipe but preparing an offering. Plato thought cooking a lesser art, if an art at all, but Kramer proves him wrong not just in words but, I imagine, in act.

Jane Kramer started cooking when she started writing. Her first dish, a tinned-tuna curry, was assembled on a tiny stove in her graduate student apartment while she pondered her first writing assignment. From there, whether her travels took her to a tent settlement in the Sahara for an afternoon interview with an old Berber woman toiling over goat stew, or to the great London restaurateur and author Yotam Ottolenghi's Notting Hill apartment, where they assembled a buttered phylo-and-cheese tower called a mutabbaq, Jane always returned from the field with a new recipe, and usually, a friend.

For the first time, Jane's beloved food pieces from The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1964, are arranged in one place--a collection of definitive chef profiles, personal essays, and gastronomic history that is at once deeply personal and humane. The Reporter's Kitchen follows Jane everywhere, and throughout her career--from her summer writing retreat in Umbria, where Jane and her anthropologist husband host memorable expat Thanksgivings--in July--to the Nordic coast, where Jane and acclaimed Danish chef Rene Redzepi, of Noma, forage for edible sea-grass. The Reporter’s Kitchenis an important record of culture distilled through food around the world. It's welcoming and inevitably surprising.