Food & Spirit

A “delicious collection” of one woman’s stories.When you start reading Edie Clark’s “Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers” [Powersbridge Press, $14.95], you can feel your soul settle down, your heart rate slow. Word by elegant word, she pulls you into her quiet country life in New Hampshire and takes you through her days and decades of making the ordinary extraordinary.Mostly she does it with what she calls her “kitchen stories” about food. Take the egg, for instance – it is a “fabulous package” that is “amazingly contained” and “perfectly hardy.” She writes that, as she washes one, she “contemplated the idea of perfection. I never thought an egg would take me to such a place.”In the book’s first chapter you meet Aunt Peg, who introduces Clark to the world of food, and from that time on the joys and trials of Clark’s life would be marked by meals of steamed lobster, cold cucumber soup, roast lamb, German apple pancakes and other culinary creations. Recipes end each of the chapters.At one point Clark describes an experience that she “soaked up like warm sunshine.” It is an apt description for how a reader is likely to experience her book. I did.