PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleIt took no more than a few pages for Bragg’s storytelling to seduce and to realize that even his recipes are more story than scientific formula. Each of his attempts to gather details about a new dish sends Margaret and her siblings off into another elaborate yarn ... The stories, as much as the portrait they paint of his family and their times, are baroque and profane, simultaneously moral and amoral, loving and blunt. Bragg, the recipe collector, may be honoring the simplest of food, but Bragg the storyteller knows that every tale is better for the diversions and incongruous details he lards it with.
