Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking and Coping

SWEET SURVIVAL I grew up eating chocolate mousse with a silver teaspoon. So begins the title essay from this delightful compilation two parts memoir, one part cookbook from Laura Zinn Fromm. An award-winning journalist and self-described sugar addict, Fromm is funny and frank in this moving account of trying to find comfort in a family fraught with mental illness. Fromm worked for years as a reporter at Business Week, living in Manhattan and barely cooking at all. Craving a kitchen that could accommodate more than one, she returned, with her husband and two young sons, to live in the idyllic New Jersey town where she grew up. There, Fromm set about learning to cook and cope as she navigated 9/11, her father s illness and her decision to create a grown up life in her childhood town. These essays are warm and generous, as are her recipes and cooking advice. You ll find everything in here, from baking for a Nobel Prize winner to courting a kidnapper; mastering a mousse souffle to roasting a chicken in milk. Fromm writes about life with tenderness and tenacity, and about food with a devotion and sensuality that will inspire even the most kitchen-phobic among us to bolt for our saute pans. If food is love, Fromm depicts cooking as even lovelier. Laura Zinn Fromm has an MFA from Columbia University and has taught writing at New York Writers Workshop, Columbia University and Montclair State University. A former editor at Business Week, she is the winner of the Clarion Award and the Newspaper Guild s Page One Award for Labor Reporting. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, Business Week, Ducts.org and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey with her family. Sweet Survival is one of those books, like Laurie Colwin s Home Cooking, destined to make the rounds years after publication, passed down from woman to woman, recommended by friends and Wednesday night book clubs. The stories, about relationships and cooking, are the real stuff of life. It s like sitting in your kitchen with your best friend, talking about life, the loves, births, deaths, longings, failures and joys and the recipes that go with them. Beautiful, delicious fare. Julie Tilsner, author of 29 and Counting: A Chick s Guide to Turning 30