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Candace Walsh
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Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity Kindle Edition

by Candace Walsh (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 80 ratings
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Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she can remember, from her frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a devoted Martha Stewart's Entertaining disciple.

In Licking the Spoon, Walsh tells how, lacking role models in her early life, she turned to cookbook authors real and fictitious (Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, Mollie Katzen, Daniel Boulud, and more) to learn, unlearn, and redefine her own womanhood. Through the lens of food, Walsh recounts her life’s journey—from unhappy adolescent to straight-identified wife and mother to divorcée in a same-sex relationship—and she throws in some dishy revelations, a-ha moments, take-home tidbits, and mouth-watering recipes for good measure. A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is the story of how—accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides—one woman learned that you can not only recover but blossom after a comically horrible childhood if you just have the right recipes, a little luck, and an appetite for life's next meal.
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  1. Print length
    341 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Seal Press
  5. Publication date
    November 20, 2012
  6. File size
    2590 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"In the spirit of Nora Ephron's Heartburn and Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, Candace Walsh uses the story of her passionate relationship to food to frame a powerful and honest account of her life." --Gretchen Rubin, author of the New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project

"Candace Walsh's luscious prose brings this memoir vividly to life. She weaves the comfort of food throughout her brave and ultimately uplifting quest to find her witty wonderful self. And we readers are nourished by coming along on Walsh's journey. Bon appetit." --Cheryl Alters Jamison, four-time James Beard Award-winning author of Smoke & Spice, Tasting New Mexico, The Border Cookbook, and The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking & Entertaining

"Funny, moving, and as irresistible as chocolate cake, Candace Walsh's delicious memoir isn't just a coming-of-age of a remarkable woman by way of the kitchen pantry, but a smart, gorgeously written exploration of the foods--and the people--who really nourish us." --Caroline Leavitt, author of the New York Timesbestseller, Pictures of You

"Like Jane Eyre and Heartburn, Licking the Spoon is a book you won't be able to put down and a story you won't soon forget." --Theo Pauline Nestor, author of How to Sleep Alone in a King-Sized Bed

"The book's brightest points serve as testaments to personal reinvention and healing...when Walsh writes with pride and joy of the day she brought her shiny, new KitchenAid home and recalls tenderly the comfort found in a simple chicken fricassee, those moments shimmer like oil in a hot pan." --Kirkus Reviews

From the Back Cover

A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is the story of how--accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides--one woman learned that you can not only recover but blossom after a comically horrible childhood, if you just have the right recipes, a little luck, and an appetite for life's next meal.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009SC13J8
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seal Press (November 20, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 20, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2590 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 341 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1580053912
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 80 ratings

About the author

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Candace Walsh

Candace Walsh

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Candace Walsh is the author of Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity, a New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards winner. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Hobart After Dark, Leon Literary Review, Pigeon Pages, Craft Literary, New Limestone Review, among others, and her short story "Christians and Poets" is forthcoming from Passengers. Her short story "The Sandbox Story" was published in Akashic Books' Santa Fe Noir. She edited Seal Press anthologies Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women and Greetings from Janeland (both Lambda Literary Award finalists) and Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On. She is a PhD student in creative writing (fiction) at Ohio University. You can find links to her recent work at candacewalsh.contently.com.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
80 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jennie Goutet
5.0 out of 5 stars Complex and well-written
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2014
Verified Purchase
I want to preface my review of Licking the Spoon with a snapshot of my background and personal reaction to the book because it does affect the review in its own way. I also want to apologise in advance for all my food metaphors.

I knew going in that - as an open-minded (but non-liberal) Christian reading about the perspective of a woman leaving a heterosexual relationship for a homosexual one - I would be entering unchartered waters. I would be embracing life through someone else's eyes who lives a different reality than I do. And I wanted that. I don't limit my respect (or love) to people who only walk the way I do.

But in the preface, I stumbled a bit. She hinted at courting infidelity as a married woman when it seemed like her innocent and perfect husband was going to be a cuckold (she had said very little about her husband at that point so I just filled in the blanks in my own mind). I have such a strong reaction to infidelity that I paused, wondering how I could possibly like the book. But I don't like to make snap judgments, and so I read on. I'm so glad I did.

Walsh is as beautifully complex and multi-layered as the spanakopita she writes about. After the preface she jumps back - way back. She tells of the grandparents and great-grandparents, and the Greek, Italian, Cretan, Colombian (was it?) influences that all made their way into her life and her cooking. But it doesn't stop there. Her life was pounded and kneaded by the dysfunction that influences and forms many of us. She writes about it honestly and heart-wrenchingly, and I think fairly. There is no whining. And just as a dessert needs a bit of salt to give a base to the batter, her story was richer for having peeled back the layers. The more I read, the more I identified and found the author endearing. Really endearing.

My only regret with this book? That I didn't get a hard copy so I could easily flip through and find all the recipes.
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Peter BG Shoemaker
4.0 out of 5 stars Licking the spoon and living the good life
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2012
Verified Purchase
At the heart of the good life is a journey from innocence to knowledge. It is often fraught with hardship and danger and misdirection. But it is a necessary undertaking. Candace Walsh has chosen to tell the story of her voyage through the lens of food and cooking. It's a good choice, but a complicated one since the memories of food, of meals, of flavors are only--as Proust made clear--the very tip of the thing. Underneath is meaning and self.

Walsh doesn't run from this. She does the opposite. She embraces both the pain and the joy that brings knowledge. She's unflinching in the face of her memories. It can make for some painful reading, but more from self-recognition than anything else. Those other universals--falling in love, falling out of love, worries about self-worth, about the future, about the past--make up the weft and weave of her story and also our own.

From a complicated and traumatizing childhood, through the insecurities and titillations of student life, the challenges and opportunities of work, the flushes of love, lust, and loss, and finally the discovery of an authentic self, Walsh weaves in memories of meals. Her grandmother's ropa vieja, her mother's cookies, roommate delicacies during college, chile rellenos and posole on her first trip with her husband to New Mexico, endives, potatoes simmered in stock and stuffed with creme fraiche and caviar, the caramelized squash and onions of her engagement, her new wife's carbonara, and lots of lots of baking in times good and bad. It makes for a tantalizing and at times mouthwatering read.

Despite all this, and the book's title, food doesn't play an equally prominent role throughout. It is particularly strong in the first and final thirds. There we get a real sense of its importance and power, rather than just its presence. For Walsh, it is clear that food is both a source of security and a way to give pleasure to others. Perhaps that explains where it falls in the story as well.

More than her recipes (that have a section to themselves at the end) or stories of meals eaten and served, her writing seduces. There are moments, particularly towards the end of the book where the cliché of being drawn along at a dizzying pace is anything but. Walsh's writing is also beautiful, and to risk again a very overused term, lyrical. On the first kiss with the woman that will eventually become her wife, "it was like a little bird wing fluttered up, and the vertebrae in my lower back liquefied into warmed amber honey." There is more of that, and most of it hits just the right tone.

While this book will find many enthusiastic readers in the gay and lesbian community, it would be a pity if it stayed only there. This is a story that has less to do with sex, or gender, or any of those categories we create to differentiate ourselves, and everything to do with being human. It's about meta-identity. And finding ways to eat well. In other words, it's the story of finding and living the good life.
4 people found this helpful
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jane123
5.0 out of 5 stars A Joy.
Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2013
Verified Purchase
In her memoir, Licking the Spoon, Candace Walsh has offered us an unflinching account of growing up and past a tumultuous childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. And it is quite a ride.

Ms. Walsh's writing is conversational and intriguing without ever becoming confessional. Many people have said they couldn't put the book down, but there were times I had to stop and take a break because I found the train wreck moments in her life, particularly her childhood, overwhelming, even as she demonstrated restraint from presenting them as intentionally sensational or shocking. How refreshing it is to see someone write without overtly striving for emotional manipulation while stealing our hearts without resorting to conventional sentimentality.

What a rare find, a writer so the gifted that she can allow us to follow her in total specificity, detailing her ownership of every event and its repercussions, never wavering to spare or generalize, and in so doing, creating an experience at once personal and universal. What Ms. Walsh offers in her memoir is an opportunity to watch an intelligent and sensitive child grow past the deficiencies of her origins and choose to ultimately become a luminous woman, mother, wife, journalist, magazine editor, and author, and to live a life that makes her happy without compromise, outside validation, or apologies. What an inspiration. What a joy.
 Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity
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Top reviews from other countries

cartoon
5.0 out of 5 stars write eat love
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2017
Verified Purchase
This shouldn't be labelled as just a food memoir , a sugary tale of family with a few recipes at the back. This is a great memoirs of a woman finding herself, through food yes and love but also through the power of words. How brave to be able to write about yourself with such open honestly. I loved this book . If you loved Eat pray or Strayed then this is another book to treasure.
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