The Reporter's Kitchen

Jane Kramer has been writing for The New Yorker for years, she’s a reporter who’s traveled the world and written about it. But she’s also a home cook, and a very good one at that. Roughly once a year for the last several years, she’s written a piece about food and The Reporter’s Kitchen collects these essays in one place.

I love reading about food and how people think about it and cook, and in these essays Kramer runs the gamut from interviewing famous chefs to telling the stories of how she’s had Thanksgiving in all different parts of the world. And it’s the stories of her adventures cooking meals, both in New York and around the world, that I most enjoyed. Having lived in Argentina and been a part of putting on a Thanksgiving where we cooked the turkey in a bread oven, her stories of Thanksgivings she’s cooked especially hit home for me.

Kramer is a great writer and she obviously loves cooking and the enthusiasm she has for throwing together a dinner party, deciding to cook something extravagant for the love of it, and the way in which she uses food to bring people together was a great break from all that’s going on in the world. If you like food and travel, this is a great book to pick up.