Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
In a restaurant family, you're never hungry; you're starving to death. And you're never full; you're stuffed. When you read Patricia Volk's wonderful memoir about her restaurant family, I can guarantee you won't be bored: You'll just be hungry -- no, starving -- for more.
Full of energy, love, and a few recipes (Mattie's Steak, Morgen's Seasoning Salt, and Mattie's Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Icing), Stuffed portrays the key moments in the lives of the Liebans, the Morgens, and the Volks, a New York Jewish family, from the turn of the century to the present.
An elegant writer, with two short-story collections to her credit, Volk chronicles the life of her family, not in any particular historical order but by family member, with several chapters apiece devoted to her father, mother, and sister. (This structure works so well you want to pass a law requiring all memoirs to do the same.) And how she can write. Here's a taste: "Our hallway was the color of ballpark mustard. The living room was cocoa, my mother's wall-to-wall, iceberg green. The floor of the lobby was maroon-and-white terrazzo like Genoa salami. When our elevator went self-service, the wood was replaced by enameled walls that looked like Russian dressing, the lumpy pink kind our housekeeper, Mattie, made by lightly folding Hellmann's mayonnaise into
Heinz ketchup with a fork."
Compared to Volk's full-of-life family, most of our families look a little colorless. Every one of her relatives seemed to have an unusual claim to fame. Consider the following:
Great-grandfather Sussman brought pastrami to the New World.
Great-uncle Albert was the first man to stir scallions into cream cheese.
Grandfather Herman, who went on to have 14 restaurants, was the first man to carve roast beef in a restaurant window.
Grandfather Jacob Volk built his house on the land he won in a card game from Mayor Jimmy Walker.
Her mother was a look-alike for Lana Turner.
And her handsome father actually invented the Six-Color Rectractable Pen and Pencil Set.
Everyone in the family galaxy was a star in some way, including Aunt Gertie who had perfect posture, Uncle Hank who tried to escape the Nazis on skis, and Granny Ethel who "braked with such finesse it was impossible to tell the moment the car went from moving to a stop." Did I forget Aunt Ruthie? She made the front page of the New York Daily News after she was held hostage at gunpoint for seven hours by a maniac who ate all her plums and three nectarines before the police secured her release in exchange for two cigarettes.
The publisher's blurb on this book says that being with this family is "a trip to the spa, a balm to the soul, a double martini." Readers don't always trust blurbs, for good reason, but guess what? This time, it's absolutely right.
(Ginger Curwen)
A Discover Great New Writers Fall 2001 Selection
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In a restaurant family, you're never just hungry - you're starving to death. And you're never full - you're stuffed."
Patricia Volk's family is as American (background: Austrian-Jewish) as "Rhapsody in Blue." They came to these shores determined to make their mark; each of them is a piquant morsel of history. Great-grandfather Sussman Volk brought pastrami to the New World. Grandfather Jacob was known as "the Most Destructive Force on Wall Street" and was memorialized by E. B. White as "the greatest wrecker of all time" for his innovative method of demolition. Uncle Albert was the first man to stir scallions into cream cheese. The last of Grandfather Herman Morgen's fourteen restaurants was a famous garment center hangout. One grandmother won the 1916 trophy for "Best Legs in Atlantic City." The other was a three-hundred-pound calendar girl. Ms. Volk's handsome, demanding restaurateur father invented the Six-color Retractable Pen and Pencil Set and the Double-sided Cigarette Lighter (so you never have to worry which end is up). For three generations, just about every Volk and Morgen (with the exception of Uncle Al, who had an eleven-year affair with Aunt Lil and then refused to marry her because she wasn't a virgin) has, no matter what the circumstances, exhibited a terrifyingly positive attitude. With a cosmic disdain for the status quo, all of them - the tyrants, do-gooders, lovers, martyrs, and fakes - lived at full tilt. Stuffed is a wildly funny yet unsparing look at how families work.
FROM THE CRITICS
Phillip Lopate
This funny, heartbreaking book is good enough to eat. A whole lost world is conjured up here, with a vitality and love of daily life that has no time for sentimentality.
Katharine Weber
Stuffed is a marvelously evocative portrait of a nearly lost New York sensibility. Reading it made me miss my grandmother and the lunch counters of my childhood. Patricia Volk's sharp, personal memoir is a celebration of family characters who could inhabit the fictions of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. And like the very best sort of novel, Stuffed is both hilarious and deeply moving.
Sidney Offit
What Marcel Proust did for the madeleine, Patricia Volk has achieved for Mattie's chocolate cake, Morgen's seasoning salt, Grandma's chicken fricassee–and Patricia Volk provides the recipes. This inspired journal through family history, as Proust's masterpiece, treats the reader to the re-creation of an era, with brilliantly observed details of dress, menu, manners, commerce and psychological mishigas. Cheers for Stuffed, a four star, gourmet memoir.
Jennifer Belle
A moving feast. Volk's life is an entertaining dinner party with hilarious guests around the table, and for the main course: the most beautiful and passionate account of a woman's love for her father that I have ever read.
Eli Zabar
Had I only known what was for dinner at Patty Volk's house, back when we were classmates at P.S. 9, I surely would have followed her home from school. Stuffed is a hilarious but fearless look at a fascinating family–a funny book that will break your heart.
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