A Table Full of Love

December 5, 2022
Recipes are organized not by ingredient or by season, but “by mood and by sentiment” in this rewarding exploration of love and the meals that sustain it. The opening chapter, focused on caregiving, risks cliché by starting out with the healing power of chicken soup, but is saved by McAlpine’s (A Table for Friends) earnest prose and clever cooking techniques (one must strain the soup’s broth four times). Carb-filled comfort foods appear—mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, risotto—but each is elevated. The risotto, for example, is seeded with saffron and lemon zest, and mashed potatoes are gussied up with preserved lemon. Pivoting to romance, McAlpine offers a couple of cocktails to set the mood then whips up a variety of shareable dishes for two, among them pork tenderloin with peaches and fennel, and buttery mackerel with roasted rhubarb. Hot and heavy desserts, like Toblerone fondue, pour on the chocolate. A section on cooking for, and with, children features fast “everyday jeans” cooking and plenty of pasta, as befitting the author’s Venice upbringing. For those whose love language involves giving presents, a bounty of food gifts runs the gamut from strawberry and vodka preserves to rose and cinnamon shortbread. And the concluding chapter, entitled “Cocoon,” puts the emphasis on self-love with a sampling of single-serving salads and a simple salmon en papillote. Love means never having to say you’re hungry in this soul-nourishing collection.

January 1, 2023
Accomplished food writer McAlpine (A Table for Friends, 2020), based in London and Venice, focuses on five different "whys" of cooking: comfort, seduction, nourishment, spoiling, and cocooning. For each one, she offers a goodly number of recipes (over 100 in total) and a raft of stories at the beginning of sections and as introductions to each dish. Emotion is the common denominator. Main courses are mixed with salads, drinks, and desserts. (The author doesn't care for appetizers, but she does provide sample menus for one, two, four, and six people.) A handful of recipes demand ingredients like dorade or fregola sarda that may be hard for U.S. cooks to find. McAlpine's helpful additions for each recipe include time estimates for both hands-on and hands-off cooking, gracious credit to the recipe's inventor, and how-to notes about gifting, wrapping, and freezing. Hard to resist are deeply comforting tomato soup, Toblerone fondue, bread pizza, mimosa truffles, ice cream with Milky Way sauce and Britishisms like "cake can be a bit of a palaver to make."

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February 1, 2023

McAlpine (Table for Friends), a food writer and regular contributor to the Sunday Times, is back with her third cookbook. She discusses how food can make one feel all kinds of things, but mainly feel better. Divided into chapters aiming to comfort, seduce, nourish, spoil, and cocoon, recipes are accompanied by swirl-painted framing that gives the book a homey feel while a mix of lovely settings and food photography puts readers in the correct mood. Menus give suggestions for a variety of landmark meals, including first dates, birthdays, or "when the world is falling apart around you." McAlpine's twist on the traditional cookbook taps into what is so fundamental about food and cooking, which is how it makes one feel. The author even offers clever gift box tips to package and present food as gifts. VERDICT Whether readers are looking for the perfect dish to woo or a way to comfort through food, McAlpine provides the tools and recipes to say it with love from a kitchen.--Sarah Tansley

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