I was looking for something light to read. Fluffy, comforting and with a guaranteed happy ending. Extra points if it talked about food. This book hit me right in the ennui, the one that I battle day in and day out. It made me feel that I too am lost in a city where I’ve never felt like I belong. This book drove me to write, whether it would be a food blog or a short story. It filled me with such fierce yearning that I don’t know how I managed to breathe through it.
That’s what this book made me feel most of the time. It could've been the book or my raging hormones, or the mixture of both.
Some of the recipes appealed to me and made me want to run to the kitchen and make them immediately. Others, not so much. Personally, I’m curious about her apple pie recipe without any of the delicious spices.
Ms. Weiss’ voice is clear, tinged with melancholy and at times can border on redundant.
My biggest problem with this book was that some of the chapters seemed to have been copy/pasted from her blog, The Wednesday Chef. Short and not necessarily following the established timeline. They seem to have been pulled out of thin air. It jarred the reading experience for me.
Also, a pet peeve of mine was how many of these chapters, when describing a soup or a salad, ended with something along the lines of “chasing the dregs with a scrap of bread.” This went on for about five different chapters and many a few more, I merely stopped counting.
If you do read this, be prepared for a very leisure pace when it comes to the narration. So leisure is it that it almost slows to a crawl, but it was just what I needed at this juncture where work starts taking over every second of your day and you need to carve out time for those things you love like reading and writing.
Overall, My Berlin Kitchen is like eating mystery meat when you’re hungry; pleasing even when you’re not sure what it was that you didn’t like about it.
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