Hemingway Cookbook Book

On the 100th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth, Craig Boreth gives the reader a tour of the author's taste buds in The Hemingway Cookbook. With chapters titled "The Early Years," "Italy," "France," "Spain," "Key West and Cuba," "East Africa," and "Idaho," as well as the Hemingway Wine Cellar and the Hemingway Bar, the reader is assured of finding taste treats ranging from fried trout to fried gudgeon, from pork and beans and spaghetti to eland piccata. And everywhere in between are countless photos of Hemingway with and without beard, as well as with and without clothes.

Boreth's contribution to Hemingwayiana is in providing the connective tissue among all the various stations of the author's life, collecting all possible references to food and drink, and then ferreting out suitable recipes to evoke a similar pleasure. For example, in the 1920s Hemingway writes about a lunch with John dos Passos ("whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides"). The meal included Rollmops (a herring dish), Sole Meunière, Civet de Lièvre á la Cocotte (jugged hare), and Marmelade des Pommes. Boreth provides the recipes. The reader is left to wonder what the Montrachet 1919, the Hospice de Beaune 1919, and the bottle of Chambertin might have been like.

The Hemingway Cookbook reads like an anthology of postcards sent back from the author's life. The collected recipes are eccentric, as any collection connected to any individual could not help but be. It's like being handed a metal box stuffed with 3-by-5 recipe cards, all of them written in Hemingway's hand and gathered from one end of his life to the other. A curiosity, really. --Schuyler Ingle