It seemed like a good idea at the time My adventures in life and food

Review by Booklist Review

New York food and restaurant columnist Hodgson recalls the unusual path she took to reach her destiny in the Manhattan food-writing establishment. Born into the British middle class, she endured a grim headmistress at school till she could join her parents as her father pursued his foreign service career. Postings took the family to socially stiff Sweden and to troubled and beautiful Vietnam. Eventually ending up in New York, Hodgson used her international experience to land a job leading tours at the United Nations. She began entertaining in her apartment and became noted in her circle for ambitious dinner parties that might feature suckling pig. Contributing articles to travel and food magazines, she journeyed to southern Mexico. In Morocco, she attended one of writer Paul Bowles' afternoon courts. Hodgson offers recipes ranging from simple quesadillas to Lutèce's caramel-apple tart and an assortment of soufflés.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hodgson (Good Food from a Small Kitchen)--a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and currently working at the New York Observer--has led a rich and colorful life, from sipping tea with Paul Bowles in Tangier to hanging out in the kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. Her memoir begins with childhood reminiscences of wartime rationing; a pared-down recipe for sponge cake is the first of several culinary sidebars that become progressively elaborate. Recalling her romance with W.S. Merwin, for example, she describes the quesadillas cooked by their neighbor in Mexico; when she has Diana Trilling and Virgil Thomson over to her apartment for dinner, she serves roast leg of lamb with anchovies. Take away all the famous names and her father's constant travel required by his diplomatic career (which she would later discover was a cover for his real job as a British spy), and Hodgson's emotional drama is straightforward and easily recognizable, from chafing against the restraints of boarding school to coping with the death of her parents. A highly charming raconteur, Hodgson's combination of sparkling anecdotes and tempting recipes is likely to win over foodies. (Sept. 23) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Disarmingly bright memoir from a clever food critic. Currently a New York Observer columnist, Hodgson was born after World War II to a British Foreign Service officer and his elegant wife. Due to her father's diverse postings, the author advanced from an English childhood ingesting food laced with suet to swimming in the Suez with the international set. She lived in Beirut and Stockholm, prewar Vietnam and postwar Berlin, tasting all the local fare. Leaving public school in Dorset, the tall teenager sailed to New York on the Queen Mary. Since her father worked at the United Nations, Hodgson became a UN guide, part of a convivial multinational circle. Episodes like being flung onto the Persian carpet by an amorous Iranian diplomat hastened the pretty young Englishwoman's coming of age. She acquired boyfriends, took ballet classes and waited tables in Greenwich Village. Instead of toad-in-the-hole, she ate oysters; tajine and couscous replaced bangers and Marmite. During the '70s, she led a bohemian life in Paris and Mexico, dallying with handsome dancer Claudio and sustaining a long-term relationship with poet William. (No surname is provided, but readers will have no difficulty identifying that Pulitzer Prize winner). Hodgson's occasional recollections of memorable meals generally lead to anecdotes. She intersperses recipes like cloves in a ham, but her stories of exotic places and curious people provide at least as much entertainment as the tasty dishes. Pertinent comments assess the craft of a culinary critic and the food foibles of the famous. (When poet W.H. Auden woke up in the middle of the night, for example, he "liked to console himself with a cold spud.") The author sweetly and smartly depicts her family and renders all her adventures with real descriptive power and an ear for language. A jolly good memoir, served with savoir-faire. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

THE WAITER STOOD OVER ME, pen at the ready. "Signorina?" For lunch I ordered sardines on toast, pickled herring, a grilled mutton chop, buttered green beans, pommes lyonnaise and lemon sherbet. I was twelve, sitting with my family in the dining room of Lloyd Triestino's MV Victoria as we sailed through the Strait of Malacca, en route from Singapore to Genoa. Once again, we had packed up and were moving on. Those were the days of the great ocean liners, and my first meals out were not in restaurants, but on ships. A color reproduction of an eighteenth-century Italian Romantic painting decorated the cover of the menu. It told a story. A young woman with downcast eyes hastened across a balcony in Venice, a black veil artfully draped over her hair and shoulders to reveal her pale, comely face and low decolletage. She was holding a letter behind her as if it contained some news she couldn't bear to read. The title of the picture was Vendetta, which a translator had rendered, insipidly, "Requital." The long menu was in Italian, with an English translation on the opposite page. The words had a dramatic poetry that made my imagination soar: "jellied goose liver froth . . . Moscovite canape . . . glazed veal muscle Æ la Milanese . . . savage orange duck . . . golden supreme of swallow fish in butter . . ." And darkly: "slice of liver English-style." Because the ship docked in Bombay, Karachi and Colombo, there was also Indian food, a curry of the day described only by a town or region--Goa, Madras, Delhi--served with things I'd never heard of--pappadom, chapatti, paratha, dal and biriani. For the next three weeks, the menu changed every lunch and dinner, with a different Italian Romantic painting on its cover (always a portrait of a beautiful woman; this was an Italian ship, after all). I ticked off the dishes I ate and pasted the menus into a blue scrapbook. I am looking at it now. It opens with a display of black-and-white postcards of the long, elegant white ship, built in 1951, so different from the bloated shape of today's cruise liners. A Lloyd Triestino paper napkin signed with the names of the seven young members of the Seasick Sea Serpents Club, founded by yours truly, shares a page with a yellow matchbook stamped in red with the steamship company's far-flung continents of call: Asia, Africa and Australia. The passenger list erroneously records the family as embarking in Karachi. A brochure of useful hints advises "easy dress" for lunch and "formal attire" for dinner. The programs for the day's activities, slipped under the cabin door each morning, are also pasted onto my book's faded, dog-eared pages, their covers printed with commedia dell'arte figures: Pierrot, Columbine, Harlequin and clowns, one of them with a red nose, holding out a tumbler of wine. There were concerts by the ship's orchestra (as many as four a day), fancy dress balls and bartender Carlo's special cocktails, such as gin with lemon and green Chartreuse. I also glued in brochures of the places we visited when the ship docked in a port of call: a "luxury" coach tour of Bombay (where I saw vultures circling funeral pyres that burned behind high walls) and a sleepy Italian fishing village called Portofino "for people seeking rest and quiet." Pink and orange tickets to horsey horsey and tombola make a collage with the ship's airmail envelopes and its itinerary, illustrated with a red pagoda. But most of the pages of my scrapbook are taken up with menus. Potatoes pont neuf were thick french fries. "Norcia pearls," served with Strasbourg sausage, were lentils. Rollmops were fillets of marinated herring wrapped around pickles. Hoppel poppel "in saucepan on toast" was a fry-up of onions, potatoes, pork and eggs. "Crusted pie Lucullus" turned out to be a pate laced with chunks of foie gras; chicken quene Excerpted from It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food by Moira Hodgson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---