What she ate : : six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

Locations
Call Number: 920.72 Sh, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Shapiro, Laura
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	920.72 Sh	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	920.72 Sh	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	920.72 Sh	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Shapiro, Laura	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Shapiro, Laura	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Shapiro, Laura	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Dorothy Wordsworth -- Rosa Lewis -- Eleanor Roosevelt -- Eva Braun -- Barbara Pym -- Helen Gurley Brown.
"A beloved culinary historian's short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking--what they ate and how their attitudes toward food offer surprising new insights into their lives. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives--social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people's attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table. It's a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food. They include Dorothy Wordsworth, whose food story transforms our picture of the life she shared with her famous poet brother; Rosa Lewis, the Edwardian-era Cockney caterer who cooked her way up the social ladder; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and rigorous protector of the worst cook in White House history; Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, who challenges our warm associations of food, family, and table; Barbara Pym, whose witty books upend a host of stereotypes about postwar British cuisine; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, whose commitment to "having it all" meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Interesting read, although a bit uneven submitted by spostjacobs on June 20, 2018, 10:38am I was much more excited about the main ideas of this book than with the finished work. Shapiro believes that by looking at a person's relationship with food & cooking, we can discover deeper truths about them. Each chapter in "What She Ate" applies this approach to a famous woman from the past, but the book lurches in the uneven results. In some of the chapters, examining food yields fascinating results such as the entertaining life story of Rosa Lewis, the larger-than life-cook beloved by King Edward VII and upper-crust England. At times, Shapiro seems to be stretching to fit her ideas to these particular women, particularly when writing about Eva Braun and Eleanor Roosevelt. A lack of food-related biographical details weakens the chapter on Braun. I thought the author's writing on Roosevelt was overshadowed by her interpretation of Roosevelt's decisions while First Lady. Shapiro sees ER's lack of interest in replacing a bad cook as punishment of a philandering & emotionally distant President Roosevelt, but doesn't provide enough support to favor this theory over Mrs. Roosevelt being uninterested or busy. Overall, the results are interesting; I hope that a future book might expand these ideas to look at the lives of lesser-known women.