Bread and Water

Essays

Hobsbawn-Smith seamlessly weaves together memories of her hunger – for food, for love, for connection, for justice – in a voice reminiscent of the later writer Laurie Colwin (and a little of Nigel Slater)…Food is a wonderful agent for storytelling – each ingredient tells a story, each dish is a living history, each eater shares the act of eating with passion – and Bread & Water demonstrates this brilliantly: Hobsbawn-Smith’s writing is generous, loving, and nostalgic without being saccharine. Most importantly, she shows that food is more than what we eat. This beautiful collection evokes the words of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin from The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Trandscendental Gastronomy (1825): “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” ~ Sarah Ramsey, Quill & Quire, starred review.

An early notice in the Winnipeg Free Press describes it as an exploration of “the notion of hunger — particularly the hunger of the soul….this collection of farm-to-table essays tackles floods, the plight of refugees, aging gracefully, cooking methods passed down through the years and more.”

When chef and writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith left the city for rural life on a farm in Saskatchewan, she planned to replace cooking and teaching with poetry and prose. But—as begin the best stories—her next adventure didn’t quite work that way.