Fried Butter: A Food Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Rich...
Review: ...as butter itself is Abe Opincar's spare prose and his eye for detail. Linkages between foods and personal memories are beautifully described as are the many characters the author has encountered in what can only be described as a fully-textured life journey. 'A food memoir' is accurate on as far as it goes...this is a wonderful little book about life. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: This Man Knows How to Live and Eat
Review: A friend sent me a review of this book that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm an amateur chef who loves all food writing and the review was so positive I had to buy and read the book. The review was very honest and Fried Butter is an excellent book.

Although many of its stories are quite sad, a lot of them are extremely funny and all of them are very sensuous. Abe Opincar is obviously a man who appreciates life a great deal and he comes across as a very attractive fellow in terms of his personality. I think he would be a wonderful dinner guest. I'd love to cook a great meal for him and hear what he thought of the food and the stories it reminded him of. The picture of him of the book jacket shows him laughing which I think says a great deal about his personality and his writing.

After reading Fried Butter, I don't think I will ever eat the same way again. It really made me think about what goes through my mind when I eat, about all the stories I think of when I eat, and about all the people I remember when I eat. The book really did have a deep impact on me.

Rating:
Summary: Food tells the story
Review: San Diego writer Opincar shapes this food memoir as almost a stream-of-consciousness series of vignettes; strong memories attached to food, from the Sabbath chicken he roasted the night he left his wife to a poignant Passover dinner spent with a couple married 50 years.

The title of the book comes from the eggs that his mother craved when she was pregnant with him: "the kitchen smelled always of fried butter," she says. His benevolent, patriarchal father ate raw garlic with his meat at dinner, while beaming over his wife's cooking, his great aunt began her descent into dementia by throwing a pot of Romanian cornmeal mush against the wall. Young Abe engaged in self-conscious sex in Japan while studying sushi and reached the height of embarrassment at a stringent French table peeling a peach.

There's a poignant, almost plaintive air to these pieces - a divorced, melancholy man recalling emotionally vivid, mixed moments throughout his life. In one he's quietly, musingly cooking with turmeric when a "friend" calls to tell him he's never really been in love. In Paris an acquaintance feeds him black radishes in sour cream while awaiting her drunken husband. He recalls eating ashes in Jerusalem, and picking through lentils one by one to avoid eating insects.

Touching and vivid, with bright bursts of humor and food lore, Opincar's memories weave food and life in a wholly absorbing and evocative manner.