I read this, bit by bit, at the kitchen table while enjoying (?) solitary meals. It is a wonderful reminiscence, and evocation of a time and place -- rising middle-class urban Jewish life after WW II. The recipes are excellent, and the food delicious -- but the time and fussing it takes to prepare them! It is a chronicle of a life in service to the consumption of food by others, leading to a perhaps unsavory mix of subservience and domination, love and guilt. But there are pleasures, too, in succumbing to the comfort of a Jewish mother. ( )