The Reporter's Kitchen: Essays - Hardcover

"[A] delectable collection of culinary profiles, book reviews and reminiscences...the offhand remarks about cult figures like Yotam Ottolenghi...move Kramer's writing from informative to irresistible." - Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review

"Eloquent and charmingly loquacious, Kramer's essays are sharp and insightful. A joyous feast of food, travel, and human relationships." - Kirkus Reviews

"Kramer's portraits make both food and people equally central, and the reader comes away with a multidimensional portrait that neither excessively lauds talent nor judges her subjects' personal shortcomings. Kramer writes winningly of her own food adventures. Undaunted by any culinary challenge, she went so far as to scrub her hallway floor to rollout pastry dough that her own tiny kitchen couldn't possibly accommodate." - Booklist

"Each essay...feels as if you're having a good conversation with an old friend. While Kramer's writings will be enjoyed by many, they will especially appeal to devoted readers of The New Yorker and foodie fans, as her descriptions of feasts are quite mouthwatering." - Library Journal, starred review

"This assortment of Kramer's incisive, vivid New Yorker pieces is a veritable buffet." - Shelf Awareness

Jane Kramer started cooking when she started writing. Her first dish, a tinned-tuna curry, was assembled on a tiny stove in her graduate student apartment while she pondered her first writing assignment. From there, whether her travels took her to a tent settlement in the Sahara for an afternoon interview with an old Berber woman toiling over goat stew, or to the great London restaurateur and author Yotam Ottolenghi's Notting Hill apartment, where they assembled a buttered phylo-and-cheese tower called a mutabbaq, Jane always returned from the field with a new recipe, and usually, a friend.

For the first time, Jane's beloved food pieces from The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1964, are arranged in one place--a collection of definitive chef profiles, personal essays, and gastronomic history that is at once deeply personal and humane. The Reporter's Kitchen follows Jane everywhere, and throughout her career--from her summer writing retreat in Umbria, where Jane and her anthropologist husband host memorable expat Thanksgivings--in July--to the Nordic coast, where Jane and acclaimed Danish chef Rene Redzepi, of Noma, forage for edible sea-grass. The Reporter’s Kitchen is an important record of culture distilled through food around the world. It's welcoming and inevitably surprising.