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Look! It's a bait-and-switch memoir! It's been a while since I encountered one of those.
Madison, a chef and author of vegetarian cookbooks, opens her memoir by saying that there is a twenty-year gap in her resume. It's a time she rarely speaks of, she says, but which completely shaped her life. It was the twenty years she spent as the cook for the Zen Center in San Francisco.
How fascinating, I thought. I am always a sucker for the minutiae of daily life, especially when it involves cooking or nunneries/monasteries. Plus, I've had some of the best meals of my life in Buddhist temples. I bought the book after reading that intro on Amazon.
The rest of the book is Madison's life story, mostly not about the twenty years at the Zen Center. That gets about two chapters. She explains why she left in literally one sentence, referring to "a scandal involving the abbot," with no further detail.
Her prose is good, and I enjoy reading food descriptions, so normally I will enjoy any chef or food-centered memoir. But while any given page is fine, the overall effect is regrettably boring.
For a book called "my life with vegetables," it's less about vegetables and her feelings about vegetables, and more a recounting of her life which largely involves vegetarian cooking. I was expecting rhapsodies about the specific delights of leeks and lotus root, and I got endless descriptions of life in California, "and then I cooked this and then I ate that, and mostly it was vegetarian."
Madison, a chef and author of vegetarian cookbooks, opens her memoir by saying that there is a twenty-year gap in her resume. It's a time she rarely speaks of, she says, but which completely shaped her life. It was the twenty years she spent as the cook for the Zen Center in San Francisco.
How fascinating, I thought. I am always a sucker for the minutiae of daily life, especially when it involves cooking or nunneries/monasteries. Plus, I've had some of the best meals of my life in Buddhist temples. I bought the book after reading that intro on Amazon.
The rest of the book is Madison's life story, mostly not about the twenty years at the Zen Center. That gets about two chapters. She explains why she left in literally one sentence, referring to "a scandal involving the abbot," with no further detail.
Her prose is good, and I enjoy reading food descriptions, so normally I will enjoy any chef or food-centered memoir. But while any given page is fine, the overall effect is regrettably boring.
For a book called "my life with vegetables," it's less about vegetables and her feelings about vegetables, and more a recounting of her life which largely involves vegetarian cooking. I was expecting rhapsodies about the specific delights of leeks and lotus root, and I got endless descriptions of life in California, "and then I cooked this and then I ate that, and mostly it was vegetarian."
