Product Description

In dazzling prose, Nora Seton passes on the rich dialogues between women in her life, the shared comfort and pain of motherhood, the bewilderments of men, and favorite recipes--coded love handed down through generations in the kitchen--the heart of the home.
Written in a style that echoes the language of women, the fluid comma-after-comma way our thoughts spill out amidst the intrusions of children, the softly ever-reflecting tone of our internal conversations, The Kitchen Congregation is told in tales from the kitchen, the place where women, mothers and daughters particularly, still congregate, after years of broken traditions and new opportunities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1528980 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
At the risk of sounding sexist, it's impossible to imagine a man writing this book. Nora Seton's warm, savory memoir is unmistakably female in its blend of forthright physical details, painstaking analysis of intricate personal relations, and intellectual musings. In this, the author mirrors her beloved mother, novelist Cynthia Propper Seton: "The human spirit required complications, she said, places to go and not go, ascent and descent, stone walls and smooth paths to organize itself. She explained all this while peeling carrots." Writing with downright elegance that always delivers the unexpected phrase or insight, Seton explores the kitchen's meaning for women as the center of the home--the place where friends gather to drink coffee and share secrets, where children stand on overturned salad bowls to reach knives, where the evening news is absorbed while drinking wine and chopping onions. Seton's memories of her mother's slow death from cancer and the stillbirth of her own first child are poignant but never depressing because she conveys such a palpable sense of life as a process, of experiences that may wound or rejoice but always enrich the soul. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
In a graceful paean to the pleasures of motherhood, friendship and food, the daughter of novelist Cynthia Seton writes of her admiration for her mother, who raised five children while maintaining a stimulating intellectual life. At the center of their household was cooking, which Seton's mother saw as offering sustenance and hospitality. Seton herself re-creates her mother's life in some ways, reveling in the role of stay-at-home mom to her two young children (another was stillborn), although she is a gifted, published writer as well (The Road to My Farm). Seton's poetic observations (a loaf of bread is as "round and tawny and warm as a cooling ember") and her palpable yearning for her lost child and her mother, who died of leukemia while the author was in college, give this tranquil work a deeper layer of emotional resonance. Like her mother, Seton also places great value on her intense friendships with women. She profiles older friends who appear to be mother substitutesASenta, a Swiss embodiment of European dignity, and Ida, a 90-something practicing therapistAas well as an idealized intellectual exchange with her friend Laura. Coming full cycle, Seton finds herself the confidante of a young college woman. Though the quality of these portraits varies, Seton succeeds in conveying the sustenance each relationship gives her. Author tour. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Seton here moves us through time to various kitchens she's enjoyed with special friends and family members (mostly female) and embellishes reminiscences with cherished recipes that revive the spirit of that friend. We begin in the kitchens of her youth, learning about the relationships between Seton, her mother, and their friends. We empathize with the loss of her mother, novelist Cynthia Seton, then follow Seton to new kitchens as a young married woman and mother seeking companionship from older, wiser women and other young mothers. Finally, we come full circle to Seton's revelation that she is now the older, experienced, stew-making woman that her neighbor's college daughter confides in. As in The Road to My Farm, Seton's warm, fluid prose is woven together beautifully, though these chapters can also stand alone, reminiscent of some essays in Through the Kitchen Window (Beacon, 1997). Recommended for public libraries.
-Bonnie Poquette, Shorewood P.L., WI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

wisdom and recipes too
It is in the kitchen, the heart of a house, that women share their wisdom and their lives, while they are fixing chicken soup or lemon chess pies, often over coffee(with a child or two wandering around banging on things). And it is in the kitchen that everything important is learned and passed on. Nora Seton writes with incredible grace and beauty and makes you very very glad to be born female. "When I miss my mother," Ms. Seton writes, "I miss her in the kitchen." This is a book to buy for all your women friends and family members. A book to cherish.

The Kitchen Congregation
Writing is a touch one gives another, a sharing of a theme, a passion. It is a thread that loops itself around another's eyes and then back again. And when the writing is nonfiction, when it is a memoir, it brushes a page with the inside of a writer's heart.

Nora Seton's heart is painted in the color of onions and leeks and golden mushrooms. It is molded in an oven that warms her kitchen, as it had warmed her mother's, her older friend's, younger friend's and as it will warm her children's one sad day, with her looking on, sitting at a table sipping tea. Nora isn't really musing about friends and women. She isn't telling us details of her life for our edification. She isn't giving us a self-important collection of words. No, this writer is teaching us a way of life. Her hopeful, positive feel for the world of women, anchered in food and nurturing, is invigorating. She uses a thin thread, perhaps one made from the skin of onions, to connect the old to the new. She shows us how eternal our femininity is, how women march forward but never leave the basics. She shows us the wisdom of the elders and compares it to the bitterness of youth and then allows us to find her thread that weaves it all together.

The voice is charming, for it is a voice of hope and joy. It slows painfully during horrid moments (the stillbirth of a first pregnancy), but it drives on elegantly. It is this hopeful song that sings in the background, as the thread weaves and drifts, that makes us read and feel good about who we are.

It should be read in the kitchen with Bach playing in the background, children at one's feet, and an onion waiting to be cut sitting in clear view.

BRAVO!

don't read in public
I read much of it on an airplane, and cried (discretely) throughout. The guy sitting next to me thought I had a stinking cold. This is a chicken soup for the soul book. Filled with warm textural stories within stories. I am a "hard sell" when it comes to books like these...don't like to be told how I should be feeling, and I think Nora did a good job of leaving us to decide for ourselves. Not a lot of the common childhood "let me drivel about what happened to me when I was a kid" trauma-shocker type stuff that I run across a lot in contemporary novels like this, and I appreciate that Nora chose not to go there with this book. It is a very finely CRAFTED book. I noticed how carefully every word was selected - much like picking just the right peaches for your Mom's peach pie recipe. -A wonderful tribute to her own mother, and a clear sign of good things to come from Nora.