Divorce does not appear in most cookbook indexes. Carla Lalli’s third book puts it near the front, not as spectacle but as context — the reason these particular sixty-five recipes exist, the emotional weather in which they were cooked.
Lalli, the James Beard Award-winning author of Where Cooking Begins, found herself at the end of a twenty-four-year marriage and did what she has always done: she cooked. Not for content, not for an audience, but for herself — honouring cravings as they arrived, treating the kitchen as the one room in the house where transformation was still possible.
Where Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat made the case for cooking as pleasure, Lalli makes the case for cooking as self-knowledge — a subtler argument, and a harder one to sustain over sixty-five recipes, but she manages it through thirty essays that weave between the dishes.
Crispy-skinned fish with olives. Burnt caramel rhubarb compote. Her mother’s Saturday night alfredo. Each recipe arrives with the memory that made it necessary.
