Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger by Lisa Donovan

The restaurant business has hours like the health care profession but with less compensation and worse benefits. And even though women perform 80% of the meal preparation within their households, fewer than 7% of American restaurants are led by female chefs. The author has a pretty big chip on her shoulder about that and she is pretty direct, sometimes vulgar, sometimes passionate about those disconnects. About a year ago my spouse and I embarked on a food memoir reading journey together that started while on long road trips in the car and has extended beyond that, I have come to see that most chefs who write memoirs have circuitous foodway journeys, and she is no exception. She grew up in the South in a lower-middle class military family, with a father who dumped the anger and frustration he was powerless to control in his life outside the house onto the women inside his house. She did not come naturally by the wherewithal to leave that all behind, and she recapitulated that with a bad boyfriend, and looking for a way to support herself and the child she had left that relationship with, she turned to food. She is now a James Beard Award-winning author who worked as the pastry chef to Tandy Wilson and Sean Brock, two of the South's most influential contemporary chefs, and — in part thanks to her famed Buttermilk Road pop-up suppers — developed a following in her own right for her bold inclusion of such traditional and often overlooked fare as Church Cakes and pies as the finishing flourishes to fine dining experiences. This is a chronicle of that journey and how it led her away from working in restaurants, at least for the time being. I liked this, but I did not love it.