Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen, with Recipes

Pass the Polenta is a collection of essays about home cooking, which is to say it's a book about home and family and tradition and the unspoken connectedness that comes of people pushing their knees under a table and passing plates of food back and forth.

Pass the Polenta is a book about taking forward from the past all that is relevant, and savoring as memory those elements that serve better as the fodder for stories. For Lust, unlike too many food writers, doesn't simply like the idea of food as something to carry on about, she likes to eat and to cook, to dine with friends and family, and she draws this passion into her writing. When she's cooking at her keyboard, you can taste her best work on the page. And then there is the handful of recipes at the back of the book: stew and polenta, roast chicken, her grandmother's pie, sauerkraut, and potato and leek soup, among others. Connections.

Teresa Lust hails from central Washington State, where agriculture is king. She's Italian on her mother's side of the family--hence the polenta of the title. Somehow a biology degree pushed her into commercial cooking, and commercial cooking got her moving from Washington to California, then from California to New England, where she turned her attention to writing as well as cooking, and earned an M.F.A. It's a happy marriage for Lust, this sense that what's on the plate is more than food, this sense that words on a page can be more than information. It's all to the reader's benefit. --Schuyler Ingle