Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes

I could hardly put the book down long enough to have the Union Square book rep ring me up. Amanda Hesser is a woman after my own heart when it comes to food and how it celebrates life. This book is intriguing and inspirational as it brings back memories of dinner parties past and helps to project toward the ones yet to happen. You happily become lost in a year in the life of Amanda and Mr. Latte - especially if you're in NYC and know the restaurants, chefs, and neighborhoods she talks about. If you love to cook for people, enjoy the full experience of eating out, and take pleasure in thinking up fun dinner menu's for friends this book is totally for you. It really brings out the interconnectedness of what this potent trifecta does to bring people together. The recipes sprinkled through the book are awesome - i've tried the salt crusted shrimp, ginger duck with rice, almond cake, and creme fraiche whipped cream which all came out superbly. If this quote means anything to you, this book is a must have: "The first meal you cook for someone is intimate. Not just if it's for a date. And not just because no one cooks anymore - it really has nothing to do with whether you are a good cook or not. It's entry into the way you think, what you've seen and know, the way you treat others, how you perceive pleasure. Dinner guests can see by how you compose a meal if you are ungenerous hothead or a nurturer, stingy or cleaver, fussy or stylish". Have fun!

I read Amanda Hesser's COOKING FOR MR. LATTE while recovering from surgery. What a delight! I could hardly wait to get into the kitchen and try her recipes.The recipes are written in a casual, conversational style, probably much like those family recipes scribbled on the old 3x5 cards you probably still have in your kitchen along with your online digests and fancy cookbooks. Her recipes are like those on the cards, delicious, reliable and homey -- the ones you return to when you want comfort in the kitchen, not a "project". (Try the Meyer Lemon Linguine w/Creme Fraiche, the chocolate 'Dump-It Cake', Oven Fried Chicken, and the Beets, Apples and Ginger with Clementine Vinaigrette.) Amanda Hesser shares with us her friendly, foodie persona and delivers recipes that transport us into her Grandmother's kitchen on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, a friend's place in Boston, and back to her apartment in NYC. Amanda Hesser highlights the joys of sharing good food with good company, even when that company is yourself (e.g. "single girl salmon").I applaud Amanda Hesser for following her passion and making a career out of her love and interest in food. Rather than seeing her as pretentious, I see her as an inspiration.

I bought this book the day it came out. For at least a year, I saved Amanda Hesser's columns from the Sunday NY Times in a little file folder, and followed the charming story of her romance with Mr. Latte. This book is collection of these columns I had saved (and a few that I missed). It is really like a wish come true for me. Now if only someone will release the entire The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd series on DVD...Hesser has a way of making food personal, and this is her most personal work to date. It is not solely a cook book, it is a story of her relationship and eventual marriage, interpreted with recipes. And the recipes work.The recipes are varied -- some are haute cuisine, and others are comfort food. The technique is generally accessible to anyone. If you never felt successful about cooking duck, try the Ginger Duck -- it is fool proof and impressive. The Dump It cake also works like a charm, but no one will think it anything but homemade.My favorite chapter is Fine Dining in the Sky, and in it Hesser prepares her own provisions for a trans Atlantic flight. As a fellow neurotic traveler, I too worry that my last meal might be some sort of dreck, and I agree with the importance of having the cocktail while in flight. How many cook books present picnic food to bring on the plane?The chapter in which Hesser and her fellow Manhattanites gather together after the 9/11 attacks is very moving, the food is simple, and you know, you really know this is how it played out. There are funny moments, too, like the party where she tries to use Julia Child's French Chef recipes for a party and realized some of Julia's wisdom is eternal.It is easy to dismiss this book as facile, but the recipes are good, and the narrative really works. It is a bit precious with the Bendel-esque drawings, but it seems a small complaint. Hesser might be the only cookery writer working today in the tradition of Elizabeth David or MFK Fisher, and while that is a shame, I'm glad she is doing it.You should also check out The Cook and the Gardener -- another very personal cookbook by Hesser.

In one way, this is simply a book about making connections through the medium of sharing food, or, in some cases, making connections in spite of that act. Of course, the main connection is the one that propels the narrative: the developing relationship between the author and Mr. Latte.Though the pair have many things in common from the beginning, taste in food is emphatically not one of these. With candor and elan, Ms. Hesser writes of the bumpy ride she and Mr. Latte take from their first (blind) date to the altar. As with all good relationships, there are missteps, misunderstandings, attitude adjustments on both sides, leaps of faith, and the desire to make it work against pretty substantial odds. By the end of the book, they've both changed. The connection is made.But there are smaller connections: the kinship established between Ms. Hesser and Prakash, a visitor from India, after they share a meal together at an upscale new York restaurant. This connection, by the way, comes about only from the exigencies and conditions of Ms. Hesser's profession as a food writer, a profession seen at first by her visitor from the third world as exceedingly odd and, probably, rather superficial. There is the connection between Ms. Hesser and her grandmother, a relationship tested by a family trip to Italy where Grandmom was not quite as receptive to doing as the Romans do when in Rome as Amanda would have liked. Yet after a subsequent visit to her grandmother's house on the Eastern Shore, all is well again, thanks to a meal of soft-shelled crabs, yellow wax beans and blueberry pie.And then there is the dinner shared by a group of Amanda's and Mr. Latte's friends in the very sad aftermath of September 11th. The friends came from many places, from Bolivia, Los Angeles, Mexico City, England, and New York, of course- a multipronged, mulitnational and, in the circumstances, very comforting connection indeed..Throughout, Amanda shares the recipes that accompany these episodes of her life. And they are wonderful recipes. I have been cooking for thirty years, with pretty high standards myself, and I am captivated by them. Judy Hesser's oven-fried chicken is superb. And the Branzino poached in olive oil is unlike any fish dish I've ever tried, so fragrant and meltingly tender! And then there is Baba's Ginger Duck. If reading about that doesn't transport you to another world, then you are not one of those for whom this book is written, that is to say, those who enjoy the life of the senses, of conviviality, of culinary pleasures simple as well as sophisticated. And if the story of this young woman's love affair with her equally engaging young man doesn't charm you, then, really, that is your loss. Resign yourself to eternal curmudgeondom and be done with it. Thank you, Ms.Hesser, for having shared so much with the rest of us.

Having cooked often from THE COOK AND THE GARDNER and enjoyed Ms. Hesser's NYT column, I was very happy to see this book. Most of the recipes sound delicious (especially the vanilla loaves and the Airplane Salad) but what I loved most is Ms. Hesser's willingness to show that she is not perfect. We see her temper tantrums when people invade her small space in the kitchen (I'm sure we can all identify) or her frustration at learning to live in shared quarters with Tad, and learning to adapt some of her habits to his. I particularly disagree with the above comment about Ms. Hesser's "gaffe" re: the price of a meal at Jean-Georges. Why not see it as a "foodie" saying what she would say to any friend or tourist who was curious about the place? A so-called "gaffe" like that could happen to anyone. Overall, this is a wonderful, charming, witty collection with some great recipes. I look forward to more from this writer!