Customer Reviews

The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

From the first pages of Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel's new book, The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship, I knew I was in for a treat. Initially told through a series of emails, letters and recipes, we learn about Val and Lilly and the power of friendship and food to enrich and nourish us. They deal with issues of trust, love, anger and resentment between friends - you will definitely recognize yourself and your own friends in these two women. The book will captivate you. Without realizing, I completed it straight through (and had book-marked the first recipe I wanted to try). The book itself is uniquely beautiful - the recipes and illustrations make it a very inviting and warm book. I recommend this book to anyone who relishes a smart and honest book about real relationships.

Food and friendship define every woman's life and this book is so well written that I dare any woman to not say to herself, "this could be about me," while reading the first few pages. It is so well-written: cleaver and heartfelt that I just want to sit down at a meal with Val and Lilly. Even the recipes resonate. The icebox cake took me back to being 13-years-old and making it with creme de menthe--I thought it was the height of sophistication. It's a book you'll want to read more than once and then cook from again and again with your best friend.

I usually like books written in the format (epistolary) of "The Recipe Club", that is emails, letters,pictures, etc. They add variety to a book plus I always feel a little guilty, like I'm reading over someone's shoulder or peeking in their diary. But this book, although it wasn't quite the worst I'd ever read, had some very irritating aspects.
1. The correspondence covered many years - from 1963 to 2003 - and many items just didn't fit. The recipes the girls are sending each other just didn't fit the time period (ingredients not used at the time or recipe much more complicated than a girl of that age would have been attempting). Young girls took Home Ec classes to learn to cook - simple foods. Julia Child HAD published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 and HAD just started appearing on television but she is not mentioned in this book and the "great cooking revolution" was many years from hitting U.S. households.

Clothes and history details don't always match up - it was like the authors had a general idea of the 60's and 70's and tried to write in detail without doing in-depth research. Some of the most memorable events of that time period aren't mentioned - John F. Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles invasion - both events young girls of that time period would have mentioned. I lived through those years -I know.
2. A lot of plot threads are thrown into the book and then are just left to dangle (I guess I'm saying weak plot development - the careers of both girls, career AND details of Val's husband, early life of Ben or just any of his life other than his love life, more detail on Val's parents, such as WHY was her mother agoraphobic, etc.)
3. I felt like slapping both girls (women) by the end of the book along with both sets of parents. What seemed to start out as girlish squabbles and petty jealousies ballooned and overwhelmed the book to the point I didn't want to read about any of them any more. Talk about dysfunctional families and with friends like either Lilly or Val, who needs enemies.
4. Usually in a book that includes a number of recipes I will find a few that I want to copy and try. The recipes in "The Recipe Club" are ones I have seen for years and could find in a number of cookbooks that I already have. Nothing new or exciting.
I was very disappointed in this book . I thought the premise sounded interesting, fun layout of the pages so it looked liked it would be fun to read. But I lost interest quickly. I read until the end because I kept thinking it would get better - I was wrong.

What a surprise! I wasn't expecting much from a book with "Recipe" in the title, but it was great. My wife loved it, and I was stuck on the plane with nothing to read. I assumed that this was a book for women only, but it really grabbed me. I couldn't put the book down and was sorry the flight was over before I could finish. This story really resonated for me in ways that I couldn't have predicted. I was brought back to my childhood, and my two best friends that I had lost touch with. After reading this book I reached out to them and managed to track them down. After almost 25 years of silence we picked up where we left off - we'll be getting together again this summer! Thanks to The Recipe Club I've renewed some great friendships. I think you'll love it too.
D

This heartwarming book was so creative and fun to read. It begins as emails going back and forth through two former friends. We can tell there is some tension and you immediately want to know why. The book then flashes backwards to the childhood of these friends, through Pen Pal type letters. The letters dont tell you everything like a book does. You never are privy to what happens between each letter or when the girls are together unless they write about it to each other. With the letters they send each other recipes. Some of them are easy and quick to make and others become more complicated and experimental. You get to grow up with Lilly and Val, experience love, loss and fun. After the misunderstand separates them, the book transforms into a typical fashion, giving the reader a bit more focus into the life of the two women. It then ends full circle with emails. I found this approach so interesting.

If you are anything like me the story will engross you and you will need to clear your schedule to read this book in one sitting.

I really wanted to love this book. The concept of telling the story via letters and recipes was interesting to me and I couldn't wait to read it. Unfortunately, the story shifts from letters to a traditional narrative form toward the end of the book. I found it regrettable that the authors couldn't find a way to fully develop the story via letter method they had chosen. I was also disappointed that at the end of the story everything seems to quickly fall into place and everyone lives "happily ever after" so quickly. Truth be told, the story would have been more compelling if it had ended after the narrative section where the big secret is revealed and reconciliation begins. All in all this is a quick read that is enjoyable but it isn't anything I'd recommend to someone looking for a book that will create a lasting impression.

This is the first time I have felt compelled to write a book review. YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK ... it is fantastic. You'll laugh and cry and miss the girls terribly when it ends. The story takes place between written letters. And it unfolds brilliantly. I read about 2 to 3 books (or more) a month, and this one is worthy of recommendation! You will thank me!!!

The most basic requirement the successful author of fiction must meet is to make her work believable. If you're writing pure fantasy like The Prophecy of Zephyrus, a future yet to come or a world that does not exist, this is a relatively easy burden to meet. The minute you choose to set your fiction in a historical time period, however, you are writing historical fiction and must then present history accurately in order to make your writing believable. And the closer the time period about which you are writing is to the time in which you write, the more diligent you must be, because there will always be someone like me who remembers the time period about which you write in some detail.

And so we come to The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship, the story of two women, friends as young girls, now reconnecting in adulthood. The reader first meets the younger Silly & Valerie in a series of pen letters the girls have exchanged beginning on April 2, 1964, as the girls are looking forward to their twelfth birthdays. Almost immediately authors Israel & Garfinkel commit the ultimate fiction failure. By May 4 the girls are talking about a proposed trip to the theater to see Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler on the Roof would not even open on Broadway until September 22, 1964.

There is something very special about 1964 however, something that every 12 year old girl in the United States would have been all agog over, because 1964 was the year of the British Invasion, the year that teens of my generation first heard of The Beatles, the Dave Clark Five & the Rolling Stone. From the time the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan on February 9, 1964, they became the main topic of musical conversation for American teens. Fiddler? Who knew - and nobody cared.

On August 2, 1964, Silly Lillypad writes to Val at camp, telling her that her mother's "new friend Angelo" had given her "purple bell bottoms, an orange mid-riff shirt . . . and a beaded headband". Sorry - not in this lifetime or that one. In 1964 Jackie Kennedy was still setting fashion trends for American women. It would be nearly two years before the male members of my generation won the right to grow their hair below their earlobes (my friend Larry took gym with the girls in a girl's gym suit and a pink hair net for an entire year and a half because he would not cut his hair!) and teen girls all over the country were still getting detentions for raising their hems over their knees. Bell bottoms, midriff shirts and beaded head bands were the teen uniform of the early 70's, not 1964. And even then, those bell bottoms were invariably jeans, not purple.

Over and over, on nearly every page, I found myself dropping this book mid-sentence to double check my memory against the available record. At the most basic level - historical believability - The Recipe Club is an abject failure.

Let me further comment on the included recipes, which according to the authors were especially designed for this project. Those, too, are often inappropriate for the time period, adding to the unbelievability of this book. Recipe collecting teens of the 1960s & 1970s (I was one) would have generally acquired their recipes from Home Economics class, the Betsy McCall column in McCall's magazine, Ask Susan in Good Housekeeping or the recipe column of the local newspaper. Rural teens would have also had access to 4H & Farm Journal. There are thousands of still-extant exemplars or recipes authentic to the time period. Many of these simply are not. Chicken came whole or cut up, not as just thighs. The grocery store did not carry cilantro and hardly anyone's kitchen had fresh garlic unless it was time to can pickles or the family was Italian. Olive oil was not a common ingredient in most American kitchens and was widely believed to go rancid rapidly along with imparting strange flavors to food. Authentic recipes of the time would have specified vegetable oil or Mazola. Extra-virgin? Virginity was something you lost in the back seat of an Edsel at the drive-in movies, not something you bought in the grocery store.

All in all, The Recipe Club is simply unbelievable - distractingly so. Leave it on the shelf.

I read this book after seeing it in Rachael Ray's magazine so I really did not expect a great literary work.but I love recipes and can usually find something to appreciate in most womens fiction. Disappointed does not really quite do it for me here.....this is the most pathetic,insipid mess of commercial nonsense I have ever seen. Complete with childrens artwork,"pictures" and blank pages. The story is silly and so predictable I had figured out the "secret" by page 45. All of this and not one interesting recipe. arrrrrgh.

After falling in love with Julie and Julia, I was thrilled to have received a copy of : The Recipe Club: A Tale of Love and Friendship. (This book was received from Caitlin Price at FSB Associates).

(about the book--from amazon.com)

Lilly and Val are lifelong friends, united as much by their differences as by their similarities. Lilly, dramatic and confident, lives in the shadow of her beautiful, wayward mother and craves the attention of her distant, disapproving father. Val, shy and idealistic--and surprisingly ambitious--struggles with her desire to break free from her demanding housebound mother and a father whose dreams never seem to come true.

In childhood, "LillyPad" and "Valpal" vow to form an exclusive two-person club. Throughout the decades they write intimate letters in which they share hopes, fears, deepest secrets--and recipes, from Lilly's "Lovelorn Lasagna" to Valerie's "Forgiveness Tapenade." Readers can cook along as the girls travel through time, facing the challenges of independence; the joys and heartbreaks of first love; and the emotional complexities of family relationships, identity, mortality, and goals deferred.
But no matter what different paths they take or what misunderstandings threaten to break them apart, Lilly and Val always find their way back together through their Recipe Club . . . until the fateful day when an act of kindness becomes an unforgivable betrayal.

Now, decades later, while trying to recapture the trust they've lost, Lilly and Val reunite once more--only to uncover a shocking secret. Will it destroy their friendship, or bring them ever closer?

My Thoughts: I generally like epistolary style novels, and I thought this book was very good. I enjoyed the friendship aspect of the story of these gals, polar opposites, who began as pen pals, writing letters, and exchanging recipes at an early age. As the girls entered adulthood, letters turned into emails, and the carefree life and secrets of childhood, became real life problems and stresses of adulthood. I also enjoyed the way some 80 recipes were included, along with photos and illustrations. I actually tried the Starry Night Scampi and the Stuffed Peppers (which we enjoyed), and hope to try the Peanut Butter Blondie bars soon too. If you are looking for something more in a novel than a story about the trials and tribulations of friendship, then this book may be worth a try.
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