Jane Dorner is celebrating her 70th year in seven times 70 dishes with this book: 7 x 70 = 490. These recipes mark the times in the kitchen where some 70,000 lunches, suppers, teas or dinners have been put to the plate. If it is true that you are what you eat, then preparing those dishes tells a story.
But this is not slavery in the kitchen. It is a series of vignettes exploring successes and failures of the mixing bowl alongside the triumphs and disasters of life. It tells of one person’s journey through heritage and history; of friendships, love, marriage, and children, with loss in its final pages.
It is a life where creativity weaves through writing, publishing, technology, craftsmanship and entertaining friends. This book is a gift to all the people who have made its author who she is.
It is self-published although Jane has 17 books produced by traditional publishers and several more co-authored. This is her own book in every sense: the writing; the illustrations; the book design, the index, publishing and distribution – with help and advice from friends in the profession.
Such a pleasure to read this moving, funny, clever, quirky, lovely book.
Food as friendship, food as comfort, food as love: Jane’s delightful recipes and anecdotes demonstrate what we all know in our hearts – that eating is as much about those we eat with as what we eat.
So much artistic proficiency is found in these autobiographical prefaces to the recipes, in so many different fields. Sometimes different talents are combined for production, as when Jane “got married ... wearing a white mini dress that I made myself as well as making both our wedding rings, and cooking the wedding breakfast”; at parties for which she provided dishes that fitted the theme (a lute-shaped pie, a golden-section tempettio de formaggio, a tall croquembouche) and were listed on witty, artistically drawn menus; marmalade poured into her own blown glass jars.
The layout of the book itself demonstrates artistic accomplishment, a triumph of design, with beautiful, witty, intricate little watercolours dispersed throughout; and even mathematical accomplishment too, as the whole design of the book, published to celebrate Jane’s 70th year, is a numerical game – “The total number of illustrations is divisible by seven and by the years of our marriage and matches the pagination in a mathematically pleasing way ... The distribution of competitors plays a similar numerical game.” And the writing of the book, of course, is brilliant, witty, perceptive, and at times deeply emotional.
As it is presented chiefly as a cookery book, the index is deliberately restricted to recipe ingredients. But oh, one might so well wish to find again references to aesthetics, architecture, Art School, Art Workers Guild, babies, Bristol University, camping, cancer, car engine cooking (yes! for hot food for picnics!), cat, children, chinaware, collections, computers, dishwasher / salmon in, feminism, freelancing, grammar checker, house clearing, Jews, opera, publishers, Rye, sports, violin playing, wine glasses!
Note, this rapturous review makes no mention of the recipes themselves. All this is simply supplementary, a wonderful side dish to a master chef’s masterpiece. ( )