Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks Through Many a Conundrum

For the first time, food writer Eskin (two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee) offers readers of her beloved Chicago Tribune column "Home on the Range" a collection of her work that is equal parts cookbook and memoir. She includes more than 200 recipes for the at-home cook, each prefaced with a short essay retelling the personal moments that inspired them. Individually, the essays and their subsequent dishes%E2%80%94each named to reflect the occasion of their creation, "Beach-House Spaghetti" or "Red-Hot Pepper Cure"%E2%80%94are as much fun to read as for Eskin to write and whip up. Loosely%E2%80%94and not altogether efficaciously%E2%80%94organized into six chapters of her life (the early days of her column, her family's move from Chicago to Baltimore, her battle with and triumph over breast cancer, etc.) the collection's double-duty feels, as a whole, slightly at odds. A cook looking for recipes may find it difficult to navigate, while a reader hoping for an overarching narrative won't find one. Even so, Eskin's clever storytelling, deft command of language%E2%80%94"Consider filo with its connection, however flaky, to ancient Greece"%E2%80%94and practical, straightforward recipes will delight both audiences. (Apr.)