In this tropical retelling, a young fisherman's pregnant wife craves sugar cane.
(At ten, his romantic fantasy was to put his arm around Debbie Harry-a pillow-and ask what she'd like for breakfast.) He is conscious that these initiations were an entrance into.*Starred Review* In her first book for children, award-winning poet Storace moves the story of Rapunzel to a sun-drenched Caribbean island teeming with magic. There are culinary manifestos: Warner's passion for food emerged early, fostered by his father's teaching him to forage and hunt, and his mother's hospitality and eloquent culinary gifts. There is a moving eulogy, delivered at the funeral of his godfather, the poet Harry Mathews. There are cooking music playlists, along with strategies for dealing with lawyers, and the common cold, including a home-concocted rosehip cough syrup. His approach is eclectic, both serious and playful this is a book without a table of contents, a book to wander in. Warner tells us that he had conceived the book more narrowly as about food and grief, for "divorcees and the recently bereaved", but as he wrote, the material outgrew him, becoming as much about joy and accomplishment as pain and failure. When a friend crafts a knife with a handle wrought from the frame of a sixteenth-century oak bed, Warner imagines the "frolics, giggles or nightmares" of the generations who slept on the wood he now works with. He finds unlaboured poetry in the tools of the kitchen, the way a knife feels as if it has almost a quality of destiny in a hand it fits.
There are moments of autobiography, including an oblique account of a painful divorce, acutely observed encounters with such creatures as hawker dragonflies, wild boar, voles, lamprey eels, butchers, socialites and fortune tellers.
It is a book of landscapes and travel, vignettes, often comic, of a professional cook's backstage adventures. Instead, it is, I think, a commonplace book, a miscellany exploring a panoramic, personal experience of food in a life, from what food means in childhood and in parenthood, in lovers' beds and on deathbeds, food foraged on country walks, and elaborately sculpted in pretentious restaurants, eaten in despair and joy. Valentine Warner introduces this book of stories about food by telling us that even though it includes recipes, it is "not a cookbook. Stories about life and death, seasoned with recipesĢ56pp.
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