It’s that time again for another Cook the Books post.

Cook the Books is a a bimonthly book club that focuses on a different foodie book each round. After reading, we cook something inspired by the book and post. You can find out more details about our group and how to participate here.

Claudia (Honey from Rock) is hosting Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang.

About the book:

The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite. (From Penguin Random House site)

About the author:

Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature; longlisted for the Booker Prize; and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. (From Penguin Random House site)

What I thought…

I thought this was one of the best books I have read in a while. I could not put it down. It reminded me a great deal of Feast of Sorrow by Crystal King in it’s depiction of a dying society and it’s excesses and obsessions. Even some of the food featured in the extravagant meals reminded me of those Roman food orgies, specifically when the mammoth, the Golden Chimp, and songbirds were served. Even some of the more refined dinners, “veal braised in honey and leeks” (109), made me think of Rome.

At the beginning of the tale, the narrator finds herself in Paris getting ready to cut pesto off the menu because the last of the basil has been used. Her task is to use the gray flour-like nutritional substance to come up with something that can substitute. An impossible task. As she serves up the “portions of gray” in the world of gray smog, she still imagines a world before:

But on my tongue it was summer and it was spring and seasons flourished and vines ran high. Butter and fruit: my mouth an orchard in the sun. (11)

She applies for an impossible sounding job in Terra di latte e miele. Somehow she gets it even though by her own admission she’s a mediocre chef who may have lied just a bit on her CV.

After arriving in this Eden where most all lost ingredients are once again found, the “real” food made her gag and she subsisted on coffee, dry bread, boiled rice, and “gnawing ginger”(19). The reality of the real world and it’s bitterness gave her a palate she could no longer trust. Later she finds her palate and appetite as she explores more sensual pleasures.

When she is questioned about why she studied French food and not her own culture’s cuisine, she responds that French food was her way to respect and escape (189). She does finally realize though that “Real food is whatever cooks are proud to make” (188) like the street vendor food she devours in Milan, especially as opposed to those high-end French restaurants that serve “just money glopped on the plate” (19).

Our narrator finds herself and her calling in later life (which means that there is hope for the land and its people). This is not a spoiler alert as she begins her narration as an old woman so we know she survived the ordeal on the mountain top.

Land of Milk and Honey is definitely a cautionary tale and one we should heed.

The Food:

The food in this book is hard to describe: fine French cuisine, exotic fair (see above comments), comfort food, and subsistence-only food. Because of the plot and theme of the novel, it was hard to find something to be inspired by.

There is so much food waste featured in the book, I seriously thought about doing a pantry clean-out and making something à la Chopped. But, after receiving my latest farm bag which was full of green and fresh goodness, I decided to go with this recipe.

I received Granny Smith apples, limes, kiwi, kale, spinach, mint, avocado, celery and ginger in my bag, perfect to blend up. That’s a lot of green things.

It was hard to celebrate the country on that Italian mountain where most green food is grown indoors under artificial conditions. It’s a place where the more rare a food is, the more it is valued and lusted over. It was also a place where the elaborate feasts’ leftovers are just tossed over the mountain. Nothing is passed along to those less fortunate. These things made it hard to focus on a specific recipe that I was inspired by.

This smoothie made me wonder if our narrator (not ever named) could have stomached this concoction of natural (non-manmade) goodness or would she have to add some bitter greens to make it palatable to her taste buds.

It was easy to focus on what we can still enjoy: fresh and green fruits and veggies.

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You still have time to participate in this round for Land of Milk and Honey. It’s a quick and worthy read and the deadline is January 31. You can read Claudia’s announcement post here.

Please join Cook the Books for February/March. I’m hosting Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (October 2024). Deadline for posting is March 31, 2025. Look for an announcement post at Cook the Books in early February.

I’m also linking up with Foodies Read for January.