Salty
Salty
Salty
Salty
If you could have a dinner party with anyone dead or alive, who would it be? That's the question film critic and food writer Alissa Wilkinson answered as she gathered a hypothetical table of women who challenged norms and defied conventional wisdom. Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, Laurie Colwin: these smart, engaging, revolutionary, and creative twentieth-century women were all profoundly influenced by their own relationships to food, drink, and other elements of sustenance. In Salty, Wilkinson explores the ways food managed to root these women into their various callings. For some, it was cultivating perseverance in the face of hardship. For others, it was nurturing a freedom to act, even in the face of opposition, toward justice and equality. For others, it was an examination of what it means to be human with all its desire, heartbreak, sacrifice, isolation, and liberty. Salty is Alissa Wilkinson's invitation to you. Join these sharp, empowered, and often subversive women and discover how to live with courage, agency, grace, smarts, snark, saltiness, and sometimes feasting--even in uncertain times. Ultimately you will leave this table with a greater understanding of food, drink, gathering, thinking, loving, and navigating the world.
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Summary: From the isolation of covid-19 (in NYC) a book-length discussion of the nine women that Wilkinson would like to have dinner with.
I think Alissa Wilkinson is one of the best critic of the arts writing today. Primarily she writes about movies at Vox, but she previously was the head movie critic at Christianity Today. She is also a professor of English and humanities at King's College. I loved the book that she co-authored with Robert Jousstra, How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World. So I preordered Salty without even reading the description (as I like to do with authors I enjoy.)
Wilkinson lives in NYC with her husband and a roommate in a small apartment. During the covid lockdowns, many people fanaticized about gathering with others for meals or parties. Wilkinson turned that fantasy into a book about her dream dinner party. Salty is nine mini-biographies, with recipes. Many, but not all of the characters have some food background in food or food writing. Wilkinson, primarily known as a writer and movie critic, loves cooking. So she wrote a book that considers her love of food, along with her desire for good conversation.
Most of these women are moderately known. A few are very well known, but I would be surprised if readers knew all these women well. The list of women is: Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, and Laurie Colwin. I have read pretty much everything Octavia Butler has written and a couple of books by Maya Angelou. I have read a biography of Hannah Arendt. And I picked up a biography of Ella Baker immediately after finishing this book because I knew of her but had not read about her outside broad history of Civil Rights. The rest of the women were new to me.
Wilkinson is a compelling author; this was a good book for light summer reading. None of the chapters were very long, mostly around 20 pages. And Wilkinson made herself and her reasoning for including each of the women central to the discussion, which kept the book from being simply dry biographies. I appreciated the list of who was included and that she made a diverse list in many ways.
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