From residentjudge.at: “It’s Six Degrees of Separation Saturday, the meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite And Best . The idea is that Kate chooses a starting book, in this case Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, then you bounce off six other titles that spring to mind.”

Sometimes I’ve read the starter book but often not.  So here we have my rendition of “Six Degrees of Separation” from the same place, 

“Kitchen Confidential,” and ending with …. (Keep reading): which I’ve never read but I know it’s about cooking and food so it automatically brings me to

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
by Samin Nosrat – 

This is a cookbook of the sensory variety, the smells, tastes, texture, sounds and sights of cooking as well as the chemistry. This book is not just recipes with stellar food photos,  but Nasrat stirs in some emotional aspects, too.  This is about way more than “following directions of the recipe,” this is about *actively* cooking good food. 

Which brings us to 

2.  Kitchens of the Great Midwest
by J. Ryan Stradal  

About the cooking and food of my own early life and that of my ancestors.  I know this food and I love it from lutefisk and lefse to walleye and bars … always bars. But why are those Northern Minnesota delights  mixed up with jalepeños for the turkey sandwiches???  I loved this book!!!!  (For the fun of it.) 

And it takes us to another book about immigrants, the crossers of borders in many ways, places, and times: 

3.  The House of Broken Angels 
by Luis Alberto Urrea 

About a 70-year old man dying of cancer and wanting to have a big “final” (70th) birthday party, but his mother, at almost 100 years old,  died.a few days prior.. So the first sentence is “Big Angel was late to his own mother’s funeral.” Because he went to his birthday party first then on to the mournful gathering. There are guests (family even up from Mexico) for one, the other, or both events.And there is so much food; “three whole paragraphs of smoke.” 

4.   The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros 

Another Mexican immigrant story, but this time in Chicago and from a child’s point of view as, over the years, the home they’ve dreamed of turns into a less than desirable place to live.  Also a wonderful coming of age story. 

5. The Dictionary of Lost Words
By Pip Wiliams 

There’s no food or immigration here (until the end), but it’s a coming of age story which is very different from those of today because WWI was a whole different era –  still Victorian in many ways.  One plot center for the book is the original publication of the  Oxford English Dictionary.   https://mybecky.blog/2023/05/02/the-dictionary-of-lost-words-by-pip-williams/

And you can read the non-fiction version of the Oxford Dictionary here:  (read prior to my blogging at Word Press) 

6.  The Professor and the Madman
by Simon Winchester

I read this prior to my blogging at WordPress but I read it as The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. which is the US title for The Surgeon of Crawthorne.  It’s nonfiction about how the Oxford Dictionary came to use the skills of a brilliant patient in a large mental hospital.

Thanks for reading my mess – it was fun (if challenging) to do.