Licking the Spoon A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity

Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she can remember—from her traditional, frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a disciple of Martha Stewart’s culinary oeuvre. Growing up alternately lavished with and starved from emotional and physical sustenance, Walsh developed a complicated and sometimes unhealthy relationship with food, sex, and love; in Licking the Spoon, she tells how—accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides—she unlearned these harmful patterns and began to make sustaining and nourishing changes in her life. Through the lens of food, Walsh connects her journey from straight-identified wife and mother to sexually fluid divorcée in a same-sex relationship, uncovering revelatory and infectious truths about love, food, and her own sensuality (and throwing in a few recipes for good measure). A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is one passionately food-centric woman’s story of how her evolution as a cook shaped her evolution as a person—and taught her to feed her soul, heart, and mind as well as she feeds her belly.

Candace Walsh has been a freelance writer for almost fifteen years. She has written for many publications, including Blender, New York Magazine, Mademoiselle, Newsday, Sunset, Travel & Leisure, Mothering, German Vogue, and Food & Wine. She is also the managing editor of the website My Healing Kitchen, a co-founder of Mamalicious magazine, and the editor of two Seal Press anthologies: Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women and Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On.