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Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family
In this follow-up to The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, Flinn dives deep on her family of origin, with special emphasis on her parent’s long courtship and marriage, but discussing her own childhood and teenage years as well. We learn about her parents’ San Francisco pizza parlor and the special family recipes for Swedish pancakes and birthday cinnamon rolls. Overall, I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Sharper Your Knife, but the thing that made the story for me was a coincidence of place: I was delighted to read in these pages how her family discovered Anna Maria Island, Florida and made it a cherished family vacation destination. My own family vacationed there for years when I was a kid, and the descriptions of the landscape and local destinations (does anyone else here know Duffy’s?) infused my reading experience with unanticipated nostalgic joy. I don’t have deep personal ties to Michigan, but I also enjoyed reading about that place on the page, as the state plays a key role in her family’s heritage.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
A delicious memoir from the author of The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry
In this family history interwoven with recipes, Kathleen Flinn returns listeners to the mix of food and memoir beloved by fanss of her best-selling The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good explores the very beginnings of her love affair with food and its connection to home. It is the story of her Midwestern childhood, its memorable home cooks, and the delicious recipes she grew up with. Flinn shares tales of her parents’ pizza parlor in San Francisco, where they sold Uncle Clarence’s popular oven-fried chicken, as well as recipes for the chili made by former army cook Grandpa Charles, fluffy Swedish pancakesfrom Grandma Inez, and cinnamon rolls for birthday breakfasts. Through these dishes, Flinn came to understand how meals can be memories and how cooking canbe a form of communication.
Brimming with warmth and wit, this book is sure to appeal to Flinn’s many fans, as well as fans of Marcus Samuelsson, Ruth Reichl, and Julie Powell.
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