The Gastronomy of Marriage
March 15, 2010
I FINISHED A BOOK! Woohoo! (Finally!) *ahem* Now that I’ve got that out of my system, don’t you just love the cover of Michelle Maisto’s The Gastronomy of Marriage? Just look at those squash. Don’t they remind you of a pair of birds doing a courtship dance?
When you move in with anyone (and I’ve had some, erm let’s say practice at this) it’s a melding of lives. It takes time to figure, and sometimes negotiations, to figure out who does what. No two couples are the same. In our case I’m the cook, Lee’s the cleaner. And he does all the dishes. (No really, I did them once and he growled at me.) It works for us.
Negotiating what to have for dinner though, can be trickier. I could live off of pasta. I don’t need to eat a lot of meat. I’m not overly fond of chicken (I swear salmonella is out to get me.) I like vegetables. Lee is used to eating a lot more meat. He is kind of used to deciding dinner just hours before. Figuring out how we were going to work together in the kitchen even after two years of living together is a process for us, one that I expect to continue for the rest of our relationship.
Every couple does this dance. In the case of Michelle and her fiance it was about more than just a melding of lives, it was a melding of cultures. She’s Italian-American, he’s Chinese-American. She’s vegetarian, he eat meat. Each are drawn to the traditional flavours they grew up with. How do they negotiate that?
By compromise. It helps that they both like to cook and can share kitchen duty. But then her soon-to-be husband takes on extra work to pay for their wedding. In exchange she takes over all the kitchen duty. Now she’s negotiating the food terrain largely on her own. She also finds herself facing her own thoughts on gender roles. She doesn’t want to be “the wife in the kitchen.”
It was a nice read. Kind of short. There were recipes dotted through out the book. I get my only real disappointment was that although the book is called The Gastronomy of Marriage and we are there for the planning of the wedding we never get to see them married. It stops before their wedding day. That was a big of a let-down.
March 15th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Oooh! Good foodie writing’s been on my mind lately, will absolutely pick this up!
Elizabeth W´s last blog ..Congrats to the Blue Marble Bookstore!
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March 15th, 2010 at 11:34 am
I think it’s the season. Spring and summer scream food-lit at me. Which reminds me…I wonder if I ever went back and labelled all the food-lit posts… I only created the category about a year ago (despite the fact hat I’ve been reading it for years).
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March 15th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I LOVE the cover! It’s lovely and it does look like birds. I agree the title is very misleading, though, if there is nothing about marriage actually in the book!
Aarti´s last blog ..Sunday Salon: Do you fall for the hype?
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sassymonkey Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I wouldn’t say it wasn’t about marriage. It’s very much about their first year of living together, and it is the year leading up to their marriage. I just thought, based on the way the book started and how we hear much about the wedding plans we’d actually get to the wedding. But the book stops a couple of weeks before the wedding. It was a bit of a let-down because it felt like it was building up to that being the climax of the book and then it just ended.
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March 17th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Yay! I’m glad you were finally able to finish a book. This sounds like a great book plus with the cute cover, it’s going on my TBR list.
Vasilly´s last blog ..Sunday Salon: The Week in Review
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sassymonkey Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 9:54 am
It’s a fun book but I’ll freely admit that I read it because of the cover. I’m a complete sucker for a good cover, especially when it comes to food-lit.
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March 18th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
This sounds like a fun read. It is amazing how things like food (what you eat, when you eat it) can really be a pivotal factor in the success or failure of a relationship but it sure is!
Kathleen´s last blog ..I’m An Award Winner?
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March 21st, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I keep hearing about this one. My sister-in-law enjoyed it, and recommended it to me. And that is a good cover, isn’t it?
gentle reader´s last blog ..Sunday Salon–British reading and Spring!
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March 24th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
I loved this book as well. And after I reviewed it, Michelle stopped by my page and left a sweet somment:) She’s a very sweet person, and I hope she releases another book soon!
Jessica´s last blog ..38: Incredible!
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