Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton

In effect, it can be reduced to a 4 x 6-inch recipe card, something that can fit into a shirt pocket. In mourning the partial loss of her heritage, the author finds that, ultimately, heritage always finds other ways of coming to meet us. Biting through the Skin shows how we maintain our differences as well as how we come together through what and how we cook and eat. Through her journeys and her marriage to an American man whose grandparents hailed from Germany and Sweden, she learned that her family was not alone in being a small pocket of culture sheltered from the larger world. Her parents transferred the cultural, spiritual, and family values they had brought with them to their children only behind the closed doors of their home, through the rituals of cooking, serving, and eating Bengali food and making a proper cup of tea.Īs a girl and a young woman, Nina traveled to her ancestral India as well as to college and to Peace Corps service in Tunisia. Embracing American culture, the Mukerjee family ate hamburgers and softserve ice cream, took a visiting guru out on the lake in their motorboat, and joined the Shriners. Author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s parents brought her from Bengal in northern India to the small town of Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1964, decades before you could find long-grain rice or plain yogurt in American grocery stores. At once a traveler’s tale, a memoir, and a mouthwatering cookbook, Biting through the Skin offers a first-generation immigrant’s perspective on growing up in America’s heartland.

Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton