Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food
Author: John Haney
In this beautifully written, vividly rendered memoir, John Haney, Gourmet magazine’s copy chief, describes his family’s day-to-day struggles, from the twilight of Queen Victoria’s reign to the dawn of the third millennium, in London’s least affluent working-class enclaves and suburbs, including a place called the Isle of Dogs–and reflects on how his family’s affection for the past and the food they loved brought them all together.
As a young John grows up in the fifties and sixties, the Haneys are a rough-and-tumble clan of bus drivers, telegraph operators, salesmen, junior civil servants, and secretaries. They work hard to put meals on the table and a shilling in the gas meter. When they gather at weddings and wakes and Christmas parties, they talk about politics and two world wars, drink cheap sherry, chain-smoke cigarettes, and eat platefuls of distinctly British fare: winkles, whelks, sausage rolls, marmalade sandwiches, and spotted dick.
Enchanted and, at the same time, slightly embarrassed by his Cockney pedigree, the young John Haney lives a life torn between his colorful East End relatives–with their penchant for bangers, bacon sandwiches, and highly irreverent banter–and his lower-middle-class mother, who is preoccupied with her children’s education. Thanks to the generosity of his more moneyed neighbors, John is able to take trips to France and Italy, where, despite his continuing passion for baked beans on toast and toad-in-the-hole, he cultivates a taste for snails, Sancerre, stinky cheese, and minestra di pasta grattata.
Having survived grammar school, university, four years of part-timehorsing around in the RAF’s equivalent of the JROTC, and a stint of semi-starvation in the music business, John is poised to break out of the working class–and ends up in Manhattan, where he promptly falls in love and decides to stay put.
But crossing the Atlantic–and with it the class barrier–leaves John with deep feelings of displacement and nostalgia. As he eats in some of New York City’s most expensive restaurants, he tries (and fails) to reconcile his new appetites with the indelible tastes of his youth. His sense of self becomes further conflicted when his father, a taciturn but loving man, dies and later when his ferociously proud mother, following the death of her second husband, must subsist on a minuscule pension. Suddenly John is forced to reconsider his defection and to grapple with memories, fleeting but formidable, of the long-ago life that has continued to, and always will, define him.
Peopled with unforgettable characters who find in even the greasiest kitchens the sustenance to see them through life’s hardships, Fair Shares for All is a remarkable memoir of resolve and resilience, food and family.
Publishers Weekly
This colorful and heartfelt autobiography of Haney's family life and English heritage focuses on food, both as sustenance and as a vehicle to examine issues of class and identity. The culinary descriptions make for a mouthwatering and occasionally cringe-worthy scene-stealer at the author's boyhood home in Chipping Ongan, in the Essex, England, countryside, where "much was eaten... and surprisingly little said." Now copy chief at Gourmet, Haney penned the book following the 2003 publication of a personal essay for the magazine on the same topic. He has successfully mined three generations of his family, threading together vignettes from his parents' childhood experiences with his own, highlighting commonalities of financial struggles and alcoholism. Into these rather macabre topics, Haney's writing breathes new life with poetic details (he paints an autumnal drizzle as "the color of unwashed sheep"). Reminiscent of Roald Dahl's Boy, with a gastronomic bent, this memoir is insightful and evocative, expertly conveying the author's emotional connection to food. Having inherited a legacy of "sausages and sadness," Haney sees what he eats as representative of a choice between the working and upper classes, and family loyalties. One wishes for more action and fewer exhaustive culinary images, but to Haney, food is sometimes both the starring character and the action. Photos. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
After moving from London to New York City and eating in its finest restaurants, Haney, copy chief for Gourmet magazine, became nostalgic for the food of his youth-distinctly British fare from bacon sandwiches to spotted dick (a pudding with dried fruit) to whelks (sea snails). In this memoir, Haney revisits his childhood in London, describing his East End, working-class family in the 1950s and 1960s. Each of the book's three section titles mentions food: "High-Speed Burnt Toast," "Fake Coffee," and "Damage from Oily Chickpeas." Photographs of the author and his family are peppered throughout the book, much of which is based on interviews Haney conducted with various relatives. Developed from Haney's 2003 essay of the same title published in Gourmet , his memoir is recommended for public libraries.-Nicole Mitchell, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib., Lister Hill
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
This colorful and heartfelt autobiography of Haney's family life and English heritage focuses on food, both as sustenance and as a vehicle to examine issues of class and identity. The culinary descriptions make for a mouthwatering and occasionally cringe-worthy scene-stealer at the author's boyhood home in Chipping Ongan, in the Essex, England, countryside, where "much was eaten... and surprisingly little said." Now copy chief at Gourmet, Haney penned the book following the 2003 publication of a personal essay for the magazine on the same topic. He has successfully mined three generations of his family, threading together vignettes from his parents' childhood experiences with his own, highlighting commonalities of financial struggles and alcoholism. Into these rather macabre topics, Haney's writing breathes new life with poetic details (he paints an autumnal drizzle as "the color of unwashed sheep"). Reminiscent of Roald Dahl's Boy, with a gastronomic bent, this memoir is insightful and evocative, expertly conveying the author's emotional connection to food. Having inherited a legacy of "sausages and sadness," Haney sees what he eats as representative of a choice between the working and upper classes, and family loyalties. One wishes for more action and fewer exhaustive culinary images, but to Haney, food is sometimes both the starring character and the action. Photos. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
Poignant, loquacious recollections of growing up in postwar, working-class Britain by Gourmet magazine copy chief Haney. Named for the Labour Party's winning slogan in 1945, this stylistically knotty memoir focuses on the Cockney relatives of the author's father, Denis Haney, a "grapher" (telegraphist) from London's East End. Denis relocated his family to suburban Chipping Ongar, 20 miles outside the city, but they were still eating the unappetizing fare of blue-collar Britons: Kippers, bangers and bacon sandwiches served as madeleines for young John, born in 1954. At the rare family outings to the East End's Isle of Dogs neighborhood, he was charmed by the rough, chain-smoking bonhomie (induced by hard drinking) of his father's siblings and extended kin. Plenty of food here too: Pickled onions, cocktail sausages "lined up like fatalities on stretchers," winkles, welts and prawns were the holiday delicacies at these functions, and the author rapturously devoured them all. Weekly excursions to South Woodford to visit his mother's father, a barely educated man who grew up in the London slum of Limehouse, yielded exciting, grisly tales of battle in World War I, as well as meals larded with Marmite spread on white bread. John was a bookish lad, and his ambitious, poorly educated mother had plans to inject culture into his upbringing, but he gradually and painfully became aware of class distinctions at the King Edward VI Grammar School and auxiliary military groups such as the Boys' Brigade and the Air Training Corps. Haney's reflections turn rueful with his emigration to New York to marry an American. He was far away for the deaths of his parents and various relatives, whose memories arouseacute homesickness. Though clotted with Briticisms, this keenly felt memoir will evoke tender impressions of childhood in patient readers.
Table of Contents:
A cliff face of stilton
A Monstrous Bowl of Peanuts in the Shell 3
Kippers and Custard 29
Bottomless Bumpers of Port 50
A nice cup of tea and a biscuit
A Pipsqueak of Marmalade 63
High-Speed Burnt Toast and Fake Coffee 88
The Hasty Consumption of Pilchards 100
Cocoa and Corned Beef Sandwiches 114
Greasy Grub and Gliding 134
The Birthplace of Toad-in-the-Hole 150
A splat or two of all-devouring mustard
Damage from Oily Chickpeas 167
The Graying Purveyors of Haddock and Eels 184
A Nonconsolatory Splurge of Meursault 217
Drip-Dry Shirts, Spilt Milk, and Sugared Almonds 238
Epilogue: Ham and Cheese, Egg Salad, Ham Solitaire 261
Author's Note 277
Acknowledgments 281
Books about: Kitchen Essentials or Food Festivals of Italy
One Potato, Two Potato: 300 Recipes from Simple to Elegant - Appetizers, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, and More
Author: Roy Finamor
Everyone loves potatoes. This book transports cooks beyond the usual side dishes and introduces them to the secrets and specialties of great chefs and cooks the world over. Finamore shows how to prepare spectacularly simple appetizers, including dips, chips, and showstopping cocktail potatoes made from a few ordinary ingredients.
He presents dozens of soups and salads, including rich Summer Vichyssoise and Herb Garden Potato Salad. There are more than fifty main-dish possibilities, such as Sunday Lamb with Proper Roast Potatoes and Chicken Stuffed with Potatoes and Shiitake Mushrooms — not to mention a sophisticated rendition of Shepherd's Pie. The potato turns up as the hidden ingredient in such breads as Potato Cheddar Bread with Chives and in such desserts as moist Farmhouse Chocolate Cake.
Finamore shows how to master crisp steak fries, silky mashes,
and sumptuous gratins. A bonus feature of the book is the sweet potato,
in dishes from a delightfully nostalgic Baked Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallow to an urbane Semifreddo with Chocolate Sauce.
Publishers Weekly
If there were any doubt an ingredient as basic as the potato could result in exciting cooking, this tribute to the humble spud should dispel it. Cookbook editor Finamore and Fine Cooking magazine's Stevens have paired up to produce an impressive, wide-ranging potato Bible which covers everything one could hope to know about Solanum Tuberosum. The authors do a heroic job of categorizing the thousands of potato varieties, from waxy vs. starchy to news, blues, yellows and sweets. The 300-plus recipes are organized by different cooking techniques soups, gratins, baked, roasted, fried (29 recipes for mashed alone!); each begins with a brisk run-through of potato science and chemistry. Ambitious home cooks will delight in fussy offerings like "Venison and Potato Stew Cooked in a Pumpkin" and the infamously tricky Pommes Souffl s (aptly subtitled "Heartbreak Disguised as a Potato"). But even simple recipes (Basic Mashed Potatoes, Classic French Fries) have been carefully tested and scaled to yield consistent results. Traditional potato recipes from around the world Vichyssoise, pierogi, samosas, shepherd's pie, red flannel hash, gnocchi, and latkes all make an appearance. The authors have also secured recipes for signature dishes by such celebrities as Martha Stewart, Tom Colicchio, Julie Sahni and Diana Kennedy. Although this is not the first potato cookbook on the market, it is certainly the most comprehensive; written with heart and humor and as versatile as the potato itself, this delightful volume should be at home on almost any cook's bookshelf. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
