William Hereford
It’s not just lovers of food memoirs who should read Give a Girl a Knife by Amy Thielen (Clarkson Potter, $26). Fans of American nature writing, those chronicles of retreats to the woods traceable back to Thoreau, will find a kindred tale here.
Readers may know Thielen from her Food Network show Heartland Table and her 2013 cookbook The New Midwestern Table. A veteran of Manhattan fine dining restaurants including Cru and Danube, Thielen was an English major in college before she was a cook, and is a voracious reader. All that experience shows in Give a Girl a Knife, her first more narrative work.
“I read a lot of memoirs as I was starting to write it. I like Toast by Nigel Slater, though the voice and the point of view is different from my book. I like Heat by Bill Buford,” says Thielen in a phone interview with Isthmus. “But I was also inspired by novelists and other non-fiction books. I just like to read. Next to my bed is this ridiculous pile of books.”
Give a Girl a Knife starts in the kitchen of Danube, where she’s an unpaid cooking intern fresh out of culinary school. But Thielen contrasts the high-pressure atmosphere of New York kitchens to the time she spends in the north woods with her boyfriend (now husband) in a rustic cabin with no electricity or running water, and a bare bones kitchen. It was there that she started cooking in earnest. And it’s to there that she eventually returns, to come to terms with the foodways of her native Minnesota — the cooking of her mom and grandmothers. “Like an archaeologist picking in the hard-packed clay, I felt a need to return home to excavate the old flavors and all the feelings I’d ever tied to them,” writes Thielen.
Though many food memoirs these days close each chapter with a recipe, Thielen decided against that format. “It was my initial intention, but when I finished the book, I wondered, ‘Am I doing it because it’s a convention or because it will improve and better the book?’” Ultimately she and her editor decided against it. “I felt the recipes would be tacked on. I think people want recipes because they want recipes, not because this book needs them. And I am working on a new cookbook.”
Though Thielen is passionate about cooking fresh out of the garden and using whole foods, there’s nothing didactic about her memoir. “Thank God it doesn’t sound like that,” she says. “The way I was raised, we always ate whole natural foods, but we also ate Snickers bars. I was raised to think that piety is not very polite at the table.” Thielen’s approach is more pragmatic: “I don’t really believe in good or bad foods. You should follow your taste and flavor and hunger and appetite, and you will eat healthy.”
Amy Thielen will read from Give a Girl a Knife at A Room of One’s Own at 6 p.m. on June 9.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story got the name of Amy Thielen's 2013 cookbook wrong. It's The New Midwestern Table, not The New Heartland Table. Heartland Table is the name of Thielen's Food Network show.
