Licking the Spoon

For Candace Walsh, food offers a way to understand the person she has been and the person she is becoming. Childhood sweets, vegetarian college meals and ambitions inspired by elaborate cookbooks mark different stages of a life shaped by uncertain models of womanhood. Looking to cooks and culinary personalities for guidance, she discovers that recipes can teach habits without settling the larger questions of belonging and desire. The memoir follows her through an unhappy adolescence, marriage and motherhood, and into life after divorce in a relationship with a woman. Family memories and changing appetites connect these experiences, while recipes become part of the account of finding a more honest way to live.