REVIEW: “The Family Recipe” by Alexandra Grunberg

Review of Alexandra Grunberg, “The Family Recipe”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Though the title of this story talks of the family “recipe”, in truth, it’s recipes: The star of the story is a cookbook collated and then handed down from generation to generation. Some recipes get lost through sticky mishaps; others are written down and added; the entire life of the cookbook a repetition of losses and additions. I liked the cyclic structure this forced onto the story, which was otherwise remarkably devoid of plot in a way that did not make the story feel deficient. My only complaint is that I found the ending weak; I would probably have stopped with simply “Everyone knew that it was never just a cookbook.”