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A review by janeleng
32 Yolks: From My Mother's Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert
A very different approach to the chef memoir than others I’ve read this year. Instead of lauding his many accomplishments like David Chang does in Eat a Peach, Eric Ripert instead focuses on his childhood and young adult life growing up in Andorra and France and ends just as he’s reaching the US, where he will later go on to make a name for himself.
And while obviously a love of food and fine dining is a constant theme throughout, I was surprised by how much time Ripert’s memoir spent covering things not remotely related to food. A good chunk of the first quarter of the book rarely mentions food at all, instead detailing a number of traumatic events that happened to Ripert. While this might be an unconventional choice, it’s probably also the more genuine. 32 Yolks is comfortable discussing events that don’t ever circle back to food in someway or serve as a metaphor for his cooking. Instead, food in the book is something that he keeps coming back to it by choice rather than through a deus ex machina inevitability and in that way his love for cooking shines through more for me than other food memoirs.
Overall I enjoyed the book, even though it was so heavy in parts that I would have to take days-long breaks. I do wish that the relationship between his Buddhism and cooking were explored more. It gets brought up right as the book as ending, and to be shoehorned in the final pages shows it holds great significance to him. Given the abusive culture of fine dining kitchens and their chefs, I would have loved to hear more about how Buddhism affected his own approach to running a kitchen.
And while obviously a love of food and fine dining is a constant theme throughout, I was surprised by how much time Ripert’s memoir spent covering things not remotely related to food. A good chunk of the first quarter of the book rarely mentions food at all, instead detailing a number of traumatic events that happened to Ripert. While this might be an unconventional choice, it’s probably also the more genuine. 32 Yolks is comfortable discussing events that don’t ever circle back to food in someway or serve as a metaphor for his cooking. Instead, food in the book is something that he keeps coming back to it by choice rather than through a deus ex machina inevitability and in that way his love for cooking shines through more for me than other food memoirs.
Overall I enjoyed the book, even though it was so heavy in parts that I would have to take days-long breaks. I do wish that the relationship between his Buddhism and cooking were explored more. It gets brought up right as the book as ending, and to be shoehorned in the final pages shows it holds great significance to him. Given the abusive culture of fine dining kitchens and their chefs, I would have loved to hear more about how Buddhism affected his own approach to running a kitchen.