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The field of culinary memoir is getting...

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The field of culinary memoir is getting to be a crowded one. It sometimes seems that anyone who has ever lifted fork to mouth now feels the world is waiting for them to write about the experience. Unfortunately, this optimism is warranted in only a few cases (Ruth Reichl’s “Tender at the Bone” and George Lang’s unfortunately named “Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen” are a pair of recent examples).

That makes it all the more pleasurable to discover an unsung gem like Teresa Lust’s “Pass the Polenta” (Steerforth Press, $24), which was quietly published this fall.

This is a culinary memoir with a difference. Where Reichl and Lang primarily wrote about lives well fed, Lust’s book is about those who do the feeding. Whether she’s talking about what she learned from her Italian grandmother on one side (polenta, of course) or from her German mother on the other (a great chapter on sauerkraut), her writing is informed by a good cook’s attention to the telling detail--whether that detail is emotional or culinary.

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