Craig Boreth

Old fashioned cookbooks can be fun to read. The book was published in 1998, but introduces recipes Hemingway & his family either would have made, or recipes for food he wrote about. In the intro, the author (Boreth) writes, "Ernest Hemingway was also a tremendous eater and drinker. For better and worse, he indulged his appetites to the fullest. His books are filled with episodes about food and drink, sometimes spectacular, other times intriguing in their mundane presentation." Boreth has show more researched those menus from Oak Park IL, Canada, Italy, Paris, Spain, Key West, Cuba, East Africa, and Idaho. There's a special chapter on libations... and we all know Hem could drink, he did nothing small. I do think I'll try his Bloody Mary.

The recipes are quilted together with a mini-biography explaining EW's traveling life, significant characters within, and quotes from his writings to introduces the menus. It's a lovely blending of biography and historical cookbook.

I read this in preparation for a book discussion on "The Paris Wife" and "The Sun Also Rises," but found the rest of the book fascinating as well. I won't make 95% of the recipes in here - it's way too rich or complicated for my taste any more - but the cucumber soup recipe (published in "The 19th Century Historical Centennial Cookbook as "Ernest Hemingway's Cucumber Soup") along with the home-pickled mushrooms (from the Paris section) will provide a couple of worthy dishes. This cookbook was way more fun than I expected it to be, and for me, way more fun than reading anything by Hemingway himself. show less