More Heat, More Butter, More Salt

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I’ve always been slightly enthralled by authors who write about food.  I devour books like The Dirty Life or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Julie & Julia (although the movie is better than the book for the last one).

I don’t even understand half the French words they use to describe the types or flavors, but I love to watch the way words create lyrics on the page. Now, mind you, I still call white sauce, well, white sauce, but there is something stupendous about the word crème being in the title, complete with the accent mark and the feeling of soft warmth.

Shauna Niequist’s new book Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table is like a beautifully preformed musical. Food, thoughts and faith all swirl together and what is created in a type of community (complete with recipes that I am dying to try).

She entices the reader into the kitchen with recipes that involve creamy goat cheese, bacon, and splashes of wine but her heart goes much deeper than the stomach. She writes to remind us all what the table is for: a place of community, a place of connection.

Perhaps I felt her heart more clearly because of the chapter about sharing joys and heartache, where she writes through the sorrow of her years of being unable to bear another child. Perhaps it is simply the way her writing voice jumps from subject to subject and then back to food, with an extra dosage of butter and salt.

Perhaps.

Either way, I was only half way through before I was texting a friend and saying, “I have a book you need to read!” And at dinner that night, when I was frying up the onions, I turned up the heat, added a little extra salt, some butter and a splash of wine (just for good measure).

It was delightful.

To read more about Shauna, visit her website.
To read more about Bread & Wine: a love letter to life around the table with recipes visit here. 
To order a copy of the book, visit here. 
For the Kindle version, visit here. 

I received a copy of Bread & Wine from Zondervan in exchange for my honest review.