My Mother’s Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life

Part memoir, part cookbook, Gethers’s (The Cat Who Went to Paris) latest is a warm tribute to his mother, Judy Gethers, and their shared love of food. Her life had several acts, but the most notable started when she was 53 and began working at L.A.’s famed Ma Maison for no money. “You’ll basically be our slave,” owner Patrick Terrail said to her, “but after a year you’ll be a real French cook.” She did and then she was, going on to work at Spago, running Ma Cuisine cooking school, and writing or cowriting six cookbooks. Gethers’s describes the process of preparing some of his mother’s favorite foods, divided into three meals that trace the trajectory of her long life. Among the foods are the Matzo Brei from Ratner’s, her family’s famous restaurant; salmon oulibiac, the first dish Wolfgang Puck taught her to make; and the chocolate pudding of Peter’s childhood. Gethers gets a little bogged down toward the end by his mother’s late-life crises and miraculous recoveries, but that is a small hiccup in a funny, irreverent, and joyous testament to a remarkable life. (Apr.)