Hearty is made up of 18 essays about food: andrea bennett cooks food, they eat food, they grow food, and they write about how food has shaped their life. I am always here for books about food.

“When I cook, I make hearty food. For subsistence but, just as importantly, for pleasure. To keep myself alive, and to enrich my life. My goal was to approach these essays from the same place I approach gardening, harvesting, and cooking–with curiosity, with optimism, and in community.”

Bennett’s essays are a delicious mixture of topics. A few are about experiences cooking in their kitchen: experimenting with recipes, trying to get them just right. Several essays are about their garden: what has worked, what has not worked, and how it’s grown over the years. (Bennett lives in British Columbia, which I believe has a much different growing season than we do here in Nova Scotia, but I still find it inspiring to read about their gardening successes – and failures!). Still other essays discuss community gardening and gardening for the future.

More personal are the essays about how food brings back memories from childhood and young adulthood. There are good memories like the ones of their grandmother’s tomato chutney, and painful memories like bennett’s association of a big bag of potatoes with being groped by a strange man. Still others about the highs and lows of working in the food industry. By the end of this book, the reader has a good idea of some of bennett’s life experiences and how food has been a big part of their journey.

Since there are too many essays to write about individually, I marked my favourites as I read through the book. A couple of these are about the experimenting that went on in bennett’s kitchen. In Vegan Lemon Macawrongs, bennett’s friend is coming over to help make a batch of vegan macarons. Her friend, who is vegan and gluten intolerant, has never had one before, and bennett has never made vegan macarons before. They study recipes online before deciding on a game plan.

“My desire to perfect vegan macarons is one part social, one part food-driven, and one part ornery. Socially, the pandemic has left me lonely, and the idea of having two friends hang out in my kitchen to bake nearly brings me to tears.”

Do the macarons turn out perfectly? Absolutely not. But bennett’s determination in the kitchen is impressive.

I also loved reading about bennett’s experience making homemade ice-cream in Twenty-Four Batches of Ice-Cream. The flavours sound amazing. And there are recipes at the end of the chapter (as there are in many of the chapters).

Strangely, Consider the Carrot was a favourite of mine. Bennett has deepened my appreciation of the humble carrot and I’ve been inspired to seek out different varieties for my own garden next spring. (Did you know that you can put carrot into just about anything and no one will notice?) The book includes a Harvest Carrot and Lentil soup I can’t wait to try.

It makes perfect sense to me why I loved On Substitution; out of necessity, my whole cooking life I’ve been substituting ingredients. Sometimes it works out wonderfully, sometimes not, but after all these years I consider myself practically an expert. This passage from the essay is exactly me: “I know the landscape of the cupboards like a park ranger knows their own park. I am thinking ahead four or five days at any given time, planning out how and when the perishables will need to be used, what I’m craving, what my kid likes, what we haven’t had in a while, what will need to be prepped the night before.”

In A Fifty Pound Bag of Potatoes, bennett recounts their experience as a teen being groped by a strange man while carrying a fifty pound bag of potatoes. When they objected to the incident, their mother said they were misreading the situation and asked them to apologize. This memory was still fresh in their mind when their mother gifted them and their roommates a fifty pound bag of potatoes. “how were three people in a hot second-floor walk-up going to get through them before they began to rot? Would the memory of the man who’d assaulted me wither and shrink along with the contents of the bag?” How many ways can a potato be eaten? That’s a game we play at my house too, from time to time.

Finally, I want to mention Give Us This Day Our Daily Beans. And, by beans, bennett means canned brown beans: with pork, in molasses, or in tomato sauce. Bennett associates eating canned beans with spending time with their father on Saturday mornings when he was responsible for feeding bennett and their brother. Her dad liked his with Worcestershire sauce (something I’ve never tried). I associate canned beans with camping. At home, my mother always made homemade brown beans, which are not as squishy as the canned version. And she served them with homemade brown bread (also called oatmeal brown bread or molasses brown bread). I still love beans. Both kinds. Included in this essay is an interesting history on the production of canned beans. Did you know that Heinz began producing canned baked beans way back in 1895?

Other tidbits and topics mentioned in bennett’s essays: Samin Nosrat’s home cooking podcast; that baby carrots were a game-changer for the carrot industry; the lessons you can learn through composting; celebrity chefs on Youtube and Instagram; gardening as therapy; thoughts on meat versus plants; volunteering on a farm; seed saving; and food insecurity.

If you love food as well as reading about global, political, and personal issues and ideas around food, this is a book for you.

From an interview with andrea bennett in The Tyee: “My curiosity about food was really sparked when I got to experience foods outside of what we ate daily, if I’m honest. Like when I was working on a salad bar and got to taste some very ripe local cantaloupe. The cantaloupe blew my mind. Lemongrass, cooking with a friend in high school, blew my mind. The tender, sweet carrots my granddad grew in his garden. A-plus stuff.”

From The British Columbia Review: “As as essayist, Powell River resident Andrea Bennett (Like a Boy But Not a Boy) is a delight; in no particular order, the author appears enthused, irked, curious, funny, hedonistic, politicized, candid, informative, and nostalgic. And, always, deeply personable. The essays in Hearty will appeal to non-gardeners, gardening pros, and everyone in between. They’re effortless and interesting, and Bennett’s fascination with the subject matter—all of it—is infectious.”

Thank you to ECW Press for sending me a copy of this book for review!