Bread & Water: Essays

"Food is a wonderful agent for storytelling - each ingredient tells a story, each dish is a living history, each eater shares the act of eating with passion - and Bread & Water demonstrates this brilliantly: Hobsbawn-Smith's writing is generous, loving, and nostalgic without being saccharine. Most importantly, she shows that food is more than what we eat." -Quill and Quire (Starred Review)

"This marvelous collection situates the chef-writer within the lauded tradition of authentic food writing. Hobsbawn-Smith belongs in the same vaulted company as the iconic American food writer, M.F.K. Fisher." -Winnipeg Free Press

"This is a mouth-watering book." -Alberta Views

"An eloquent, lively contemplation of food and its myriad connections to life." -Alice Major

"[Bread & Water] will send you back to your own kitchen to do it with care, gratitude, and love." -Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement

"dee's passions for the visceral stuff of life-food, cooking, love, running, loving, grieving-beckon us all to the table." -Jennifer Cockrall-King, author of Food and the City

"The text behind the gorgeously apropos cover photograph-a chunk of homemade bread and a glass of water-is wide-ranging, provocative, and, like that heel of bread, hearty." -Shelley Ann Lee Dalh

"[dee Hobsbawn-Smith's] words are luminescent on the page, weaving together images and stories I won't soon forget. No matter where you are, her words feel like home." -Renée Kohlman, author of All the Sweet Things and Vegetables

"It will come as no surprise to readers of wildness rushing in that dee Hobsbawn-Smith is also an accomplished chef. Here is a feast of tastes and flavours arriving from many regions and nooks of existence, served up with a wisdom that knows its wordless 'loveliness in loss' equally with its sharp jolts of awe." -Don McKay, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip

"This is a book for a dark winter's night beside the fire." -The Tomato

"Rhythmic and zesty .deliciously funny" -Prairie Books Now

"Written with heart and intelligence, Bread & Water: Essays is continually entertaining and rewarding. The tone-self-aware, curious, a little vulnerable-is at once individual and communal, and creates a winning humility perfectly suited to the essays' explorative nature." -Judge Tim Bowling, SK Writers' Guild 2014 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award

"there's an entire life in this book, from childhood to late middle age, filled with dee's dreams for herself and for her children. But it is also a table groaning with platters of food." -Freefall Magazine