Talking With My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories

by Bonny Wolf

St. Martin's Press, 272 pp., $24.95

My mother once queried how Greater Tuna, the two-man play performed by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, found an audience outside of Texas. It appeared to her so Texas-centric, she wondered how Ohioans or New Yorkers could relate to Aunt Pearl or Vera Carp. The answer is that every region has small towns, and small towns are inhabited by characters more like the residents of the fictitious Tuna than not. So it is with the culinary meanderings in Bonny Wolf's Talking With My Mouth Full, a collection of essays and recipes from the NPR commentator.

Wolf hails from Minnesota and is a longtime resident of Washington, D.C. I've never so much as visited her home state, but her story of the Iron Range version of antipasto (a relish to be slathered on crackers) vs. the meat and cheese platter more commonly served outside of her native region had the ring of familiarity. What Texan hasn't met a bowl of beans and tomatoes advertised as chili with smug incredulity? The particulars may vary from region to region, but Wolf perfectly captures the cultural and familial allegiances to food in this delightful collection.

Her chapter on roast chicken confirmed my suspicion that we are kindred spirits: Like a true devotee, she has spent whole decades of her life in search of the secrets of the ideal roast chicken. Some of us cooks are convinced that a simply and beautifully roasted bird, juicy and flavorful under crackling skin, is the zenith of cooking. It's a quest that can consume the fanatical and stupefy the indifferent. Her obsession is apparent in her opening: "a recipe for roast chicken looks like something a child could make. Put a chicken in a pan, season it with salt and pepper, and stick it in the oven. What could be easier? Almost anything." Too true.