Published: September 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

When asked why she wrote about food, the brilliant MFK Fisher said, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it….”

It’s an idea I use in my own defense when those I live with grow tired of my obsessions with farmers markets and out-of-the-way restaurants, the summers of 20 pounds of figs or learning to make soufflé. If food is what sustains us, it makes sense to think about it all the time, doesn’t it?

I have raised two children: one of the sort who ate slab after slab of pink sashimi at 3, and one who survived his toddlerhood on grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken nuggets. In many ways, their habits at the table describe the differences between them. My daughter loves new flavors, spice, ethnic strangeness, much like her father and myself. She likes being thought of as adult, mature. My son has learned the importance of trying a bite of anything; his enthusiasm when he finds something he likes is straight out of Dr. Seuss. (Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!)

We eat as a family almost every night. In the mailbox, I get my subscriptions to Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur. I flip through for the pictures, go back for the recipes and then again take the magazine to my kitchen, a little galley like a laboratory, and I make something that tastes good, that looks good, that both the picky and adventurous among us enjoy. And I can think of no more satisfying aspect of my daily life.

To this end, I read cookbooks as though they might offer the keys to the kingdom.

I have my favorites, for different reasons, just like novels. “American Home Cooking,” by Cheryl and Bill Jamison, is probably the spine of this group: solid, dependable, true. The recipes I love for butter beans, for squash casserole and tomato soup, the recipes I pretend are my own, all come from there. Nigella Lawson’s “How We Eat” is chatty and flirtatious, filled with English food like clapshot and roasted leeks, almond sponge, trifle, but also with pleasure in eating, a recipe for a mushroom sandwich that calls for wiping the cut sides of cibatta through the roasting pan, biting in and letting the juices run down your arm. “Pork and Sons” is a Frenchman’s homage to the pig, filled with complex technique and cuts of meat as rare as hen’s teeth in upstate South Carolina, but starts me thinking about where I might order fresh pig jowls for myself. “The French Laundry Cookbook” is beginning to seem like the closest I’m going to get to a reservation at Thomas Keller’s restaurant. His recipe for Yellowfin Tuna Nicoise calls for herb salad, tapenade, quail eggs, brioche croutons and pepper confetti, and though I’ve never tried to make it myself, I can see the map of an experience there, what it might be like, someday.

When we eat, as when we read, we travel. We remember some things and long for others. We experience a little slice of somewhere else. And so when we read a recipe, make a shopping list, wheedle a small boy into taking a small bite, we participate in a kind of hope for the future that might be impossible to articulate in any other way. And that might be the most basic need of all, satisfied.