Tod Davies

Part cookbook, part memoir Jam Today is, dare I say, whimsical. Davies will tell you her favorite meals and she'll walk you through how to make them. She is not precise in measurements, nor in direction. She doesn't have to have precision in either because this isn't your standard Julia Childs how-to in haute cuisine. While the subtitle of Jam Today is misleading it should be taken as a lighthearted romp through the joys of planning, cooking, and eating a flavorful meal. Instead of A Diary of Cooking with What You've Got her subtitle should have read "a diary of cooking with what I've got." How many of us have salt cod, champagne, or cremini mushrooms lounging around in the refrigerator? Smoked salmon hiding in the pantry? I'm enough of a culinary snob to expect people who cook to have some kind of mortar and pestle on their counters, but a suribachi mortar and pestle? On the whole, Jam Today is fun. Seriously, how can you go wrong when the final instruction of a recipe is to not forget to light the candles?… (meer)

Although this book is advertised as standing on its own, with readers not needing to have read the earlier books in the series, I suspect/hope that reading the earlier books would make a big difference in reading experience here. For me personally, I found it extremely difficult to really engage with the book and remain interested even though there were flashes of content that felt intriguing, and suggested the read I expected to be falling into here.

The book is split into three parts, and that's part of the problem, as there is a fairly disjointed feel to things. The first part actually reads like nonfiction, and although that may be what the writer was going for, I had an incredibly difficult time engaging with it--in fact, the only thing that kept me going was flipping forward enough to see that Part 2 would take up a different style, or I might have DNF'd fairly early. Part 2 was far more readable and enjoyable, with more attention to story, but the narrator's voice--as the book is primarily an extended monologue told in letters--began to get old early in Part 3, and I struggled to finish the book as a result.

If I'd gotten another view of the narrator from earlier books, or if there'd been less reporting and more scene-based storytelling, this might have been a very different reading experience, but as is, I can only say that although the book was well-written, it absolutely wasn't for me and probably isn't something I'd recommend. I would potentially try something else from the writer, but probably not in this series.… (meer)