Irma

Irma
Author: Irma Rosenthal Frankenstein
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2004-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1587294869

Ellen Steinberg’s Irma, painstakingly crafted out of Irma Rosenthal Frankenstein’s voluminous writings, gives us an inspiring and richly rewarding account of the life and times of an active, socially engaged woman who devoted herself to her family and her community over the course of a long and full life. Irma (1871-1966) was born in Chicago—just before the Chicago Fire—of German Jewish parents who had come to the U.S. shortly after the Civil War. Irma attended public schools and the University of Chicago, participated energetically in Jewish women’s and social-welfare activities, raised her family, and published one poem and a small book. Irma’s journals and diaries were private accounts in which she chronicled the rhythm of her days and the shape of her life. She recorded her thoughts and short quotations from her reading, jotted down her own poems and short stories, constructed dinner-party menus, and wrote biographical sketches of her family. Interspersed among the records of what she did when and with whom are a number of lengthy reflections on Chicago history, her early life, religious beliefs, education, her aspirations, disappointments, sorrows, and successes. She documented her family’s activities during the Chicago Fire, the city’s rebuilding, early educational curricula in the city’s schools, what it was like to participate in the suffrage movement and vote for the first time, the effect of the Great Depression on the middle class, and World War II as seen from her perspective. In each chapter, Ellen Steinberg has set Irma’s contemporary entries and later memoirs against the context of the Chicago history that Irma knew so well. Irma’s story will fascinate those interested in diaries and autobiography, women’s history, and Chicago history. From a plethora of rich source materials—including over half a million words of Irma’s writings alone—Steinberg has created a seamless, fascinating narrative about a Chicago woman who, although “nobody famous” (in her words), lived a vital life in a vibrant city.

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing
Author: Alice McLean
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136706860

This book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), and Elizabeth David (1913-1992). Growing up during a time when women's food writing was largely limited to the domestic cookbook, which helped to codify the guidelines of middle class domesticity, Fisher, Toklas, and David claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men. Articulating a language through which female desire is artfully and publicly sated, Fisher, Toklas, and David expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm by pioneering forms of self-expression that celebrate female appetite for pleasure and for culinary adventure. In so doing, they illuminate the power of genre-bending food writing to transgress and reconfigure conventional gender ideologies. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with their environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure that engendered their creative aesthetic.

The Art of Eating

The Art of Eating
Author: M. F. K. Fisher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 715
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0544177436

“Should be required reading for every cook. It defines in a sensual and beautiful way the vital relationship between food and culture.”—Alice Waters This comprehensive volume of essays on culinary and other pleasures of life comes from the legendary and widely traveled writer “whose artful personal essays about food created a genre” (The New York Times) and who writes “practically, often profoundly, and always beautifully” (San Francisco Chronicle). Spanning from the autobiographical to the historical, it compiles her works Serve It Forth; Consider the Oyster; How to Cook a Wolf; The Gastronomical Me; and An Alphabet for Gourmets. “How wonderful to have here in my hands the essence of M.F.K. Fisher, whose wit and fulsome opinions on food and those who produce it, comment upon it, and consume it are as apt today as they were several decades ago, when she composed them. Why did she choose food and hunger she was asked, and she replied, ‘When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.’ This is the stuff we need to hear, and to hear again and again.”—Julia Child “Mary Frances [Fisher] has the extraordinary ability to make the ordinary seem rich and wonderful. Her dignity comes from her absolute insistence on appreciating life as it comes to her.”—Ruth Reichl

Poet of the Appetites

Poet of the Appetites
Author: Joan Reardon
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2005-10-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0865476217

Christened by John Updike as the "poet of the appetites," M.F.K. Fisher changed the way Americans understood the art of living. But she was also a master mythologizer. This multifaceted portrayal is no less memorable than the personae Fisher crafted for herself.

Prairie Avenue Cookbook

Prairie Avenue Cookbook
Author: Carol Callahan
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1993
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780809318148

This enchanting cookbook by Carol Callahan allows us to reverse time and transcend space in order to enter a period and place in American history when confidence abounded and all things seemed possible and some Chicago families were able to live in a manner never to be equaled. Judge for yourself. The thirty-five illustrations that accompany the text document what a grand life-style it was. "If you want to see the richest half-dozen blocks in Chicago. . . drive down Prairie Avenue from Sixteenth Street to Twenty-second. Right there is a cluster of millionaires not to be matched for numbers anywhere else in the country." -- Chicago Herald, 1887 And the Herald wasn't guilty of braggadocio. Prairie Avenue was home to such august individuals as Marshall Field, George Pullman, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, William Kimball, Samuel Allerton, Joseph Sears, and John Glessner. Among the delights they enjoyed were the joys of the table-- the recipes for which, preserved by family members, are shared here for the first time. Carol Callahan makes it possible to taste the flavors of that opulent era with a collection of more than two hundred historic recipes from the prominent nineteenth-century families of Prairie Avenue. All of the recipes have been tested and modernized for today's cook. They range from everything you might like for breakfast to however you' d like your oysters to snacks, soups, salads, entré es, preserves, desserts, and some power-packed Prairie Avenue party punches. To place these dishes in their proper context, Callahan includes family anecdotes gathered through oral history interviews that encompass food, meals, health, and entertainment as well as other aspects of nineteenth-century Chicago life. Callahan devotes part of the book to discussions of the foods available to Prairie Avenue residents, the impact of the rapidly changing technology on cooking, the fine art of dining, the ritual of calling, the problems and pleasures of servants in the household, the children of Prairie Avenue, and the effect of the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition on Chicago. Whether you elect to prepare these Victorian delights or simply savor them in your imagination, the Prairie Avenue Cookbook is sumptuous fare.

You Come Too

You Come Too
Author: Lesley Lee Francis
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813937469

Robert Frost observed in his wife, Elinor, a desire to live "a life that goes rather poetically." The same could be said of many members of the Frost family, over several generations. In You Come Too, Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, combines priceless personal memories and rigorous research to create a portrait of Frost and the women, including herself, whose lives he touched. Francis provides a vivid picture of Frost the family man, revealing him to be intensely engaged rather than the aloof artist that is commonly portrayed. She shares with us the devastation Frost and Elinor experienced when faced with tragic illnesses, both physical and mental, and the untimely death of family members. Elinor’s own death added to the poet’s despair and unleashed complex feelings throughout the family. (Francis’s mother would lament the toll taken on Elinor by what she perceived as Frost’s "selfishness" in the life he had chosen.) This is also the story of Lesley Frost, Francis’s remarkable mother, who struggled to emerge from her celebrated father’s shadow, while, as one of the people closest to him, sharing his intuitive impulse to write and to indulge their mutual love of books and poetry. Francis would herself become yet another writer and, like her grandfather and mother before her, a teacher--despite sharing Frost’s sense of being "imperfectly academic." In addition, Francis explores Frost’s professional relationships with women outside the family, such as the poets Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, and Susan Hayes Ward. Francis’s invaluable insights into Frost’s poetry and her inclusion of previously unpublished family writings and photographs make this book essential to Frost scholarship. But You Come Too will appeal to anyone interested in this great poet’s life and work. It also reveals unforgettable stories of strong, independent women and their passion to create and share poetry.

A Stew or a Story

A Stew or a Story
Author:
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2007-07-24
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1593761651

Like the savory, simple dishes she favored, M. F. K. Fisher's writing was often "short, stylish, concentrated in flavor, and varied in form," writes Joan Reardon in her introduction to this eclectic, lively collection. Magazine writing launched and helped to sustain Fisher's long, illustrious career and in these fifty–seven pieces we experience again the inimitable voice of the woman widely known to have elevated food writing to a literary art. A Stew or a Story covers five decades of Fisher's writing for such notable and diverse publications as Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Ladies Home Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vogue. But collected here also are articles nearly impossible to find from lesser–known, more ephemeral magazines. Essays on people, places, and of course food, mix here with delightful fiction to become a delectable feast.

Lost Restaurant of Chicago

Lost Restaurant of Chicago
Author: Greg Borzo
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2019-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439665923

A Chicago author’s tribute to the historic eateries and storied local haunts that the Windy City has loved and lost. Many of Chicago’s greatest or most unusual restaurants are “no longer taking reservations.” But even if they’re gone, they're definitely not forgotten. From steakhouses to delis, these dining destinations attracted movie stars, fed the hungry, launched nationwide trends and launched a smorgasbord of culinary innovations. Stretching across almost two centuries of memorable service and adventurous menus, Lost Restaurants of Chicago revisits the institutions entrusted with the city's special occasions. Noted author Greg Borzo dishes out course after course of fondly remembered fare, from Maxim's to Charlie Trotter’s and Trader Vic's to the Blackhawk.

Books and Notes

Books and Notes
Author: Los Angeles County Public Library
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1364
Release: 1926
Genre:
ISBN: