The Kitchen Whisperers

Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends

By: Dorothy Kalins

Narrated by: Abby Craden

A beautifully written tribute to the people who teach us to cook and guide our hands in the kitchen, by a founding editor of Saveur.

The cooking lessons that stick with us are rarely the ones we read in books or learn through blog posts or YouTube videos (depending on your generation); they’re the ones we pick up as we spend time with good cooks in the kitchen. Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Savuer magazine, calls the people who pass on their cooking wisdom her Kitchen Whisperers. Consciously or not, they help make us the cooks we are—and help show the way to the kind of cooks we have the potential to become.

Dorothy’s prolific career in food media means many of her Kitchen Whisperers are some of the best chefs around (though the lessons she’s learned from fellow home cooks are just as important). For Dorothy, a lifetime of exposure to incredible cooks and chefs means that she can’t enter her kitchen without hearing the voices of mentors and friends with whom she cooked over the years as they reveal their favorite techniques. Marcella Hazan warns her against valuing look over flavor. Christopher Hirsheimer advises that sometimes water is the best liquid to add to a dish rather than stock or wine. Her onetime Southern mother-in-law wisely knows that not everyone who asks for a biscuit is food hungry. Woven through the text are dozens of narrative recipes, from her mother’s meat loaf to David Tanis’s Swiss Chard Gratin.

The Kitchen Whisperers will prompt older readers to identify and cherish the food mentors in their own lives, just as it will inspire younger readers to seek them out. Stories and recipes from Dorothy’s notable connections will inspire the creative food journeys of all.

Distracted by mispronunciations

The author has lived an interesting life with opportunities to make friends and spend time with some well known (and some not-so-well known but still interesting) chefs, cooks, and cookbook writers. As an editor with an impressive resume, she writes her story beautifully.
The narrator is a fluent reader with a pleasant voice. Her mispronunciations of French words and occasionally words from English or another language were distracting. It made me feel bad for the author to hear her words pronounced this way. I wondered if the publisher has no editors who can pronounce French. Final consonants (with the exception of c, r, f, and l) are usually not pronounced in French.

needs an accompanying PDF of recipes

Well written with good narration. I'd just a PDF of the recipes because there are so many descriptions of how to cook or bake something interesting in the text as well as recipes read separately. Very frustrating as an audio book.