Snack Book

This is maybe the first Christmas ever in which I didn’t receive a single novel, and in which the majority of the books I got were based on food. While I’m not a person who reads cookbooks for fun very often, I do eat up (pun intended) the delicious and delightful food books, especially memoirs. I love reading about people’s adventures in cooking, snooping through any included recipes, and listening to their stories of what the food has meant to them.

The Joy of Snacks, by Laura Goodman, is a mix of food writing genres. It reads more like a series of blog posts, which it may have once been, than a book. The chapters are categories of snacks, such as crisps or coffee or cheese, and they consist of recipes linked loosely by commentary, full of the author’s thoughts on the snack’s variations or stories of her experiences with it. The book is dotted with bulleted lists of snacking memories, which may have been my favorite part, as they induced nostalgia for my own snacking memories. The whole thing is light, bright, and fun, everything that the bright yellow cover scattered with potato chips suggests it will be.

This was a super fun book because snacks are my love language. I sometimes don’t even eat a full meal because I’m thinking about the snacking I want to do and need to make sure I save room. My very favorite snacks are chips or fries, preferably with ketchup or some other sauce, and I eat some chips almost every day (and Laura Goodman does not discriminate against these easy snacks, spending a whole section on the joy of chips). My daughter shares this love, and is even more passionate about ketchup than I am, so between the two of us, we rarely run out of good snacks. Recently, at the end of the first day back at work and school after a break, I stopped at the store to reward us with two bags of our current favorite brand of chips, and I paired mine with a cold Diet Coke over ice. It was the perfect end to the day and altered my mood instantly.

This is what the best snacks do for us: they bring us joy, and they satisfy our need for good things and our need to feel safe and cheered. Reading about snacks can do many of the same things, as it lets us join a community of other people who love the same things we do, and it lets us discover delicious new things that other people are eating, which we can now try. I don’t turn down good snacks, or good books about them either.