The Kitchen Congregation: Gatherings at a Timeless Hearth

In a graceful paean to the pleasures of motherhood, friendship and food, the daughter of novelist Cynthia Seton writes of her admiration for her mother, who raised five children while maintaining a stimulating intellectual life. At the center of their household was cooking, which Seton's mother saw as offering sustenance and hospitality. Seton herself re-creates her mother's life in some ways, reveling in the role of stay-at-home mom to her two young children (another was stillborn), although she is a gifted, published writer as well (The Road to My Farm). Seton's poetic observations (a loaf of bread is as ""round and tawny and warm as a cooling ember"") and her palpable yearning for her lost child and her mother, who died of leukemia while the author was in college, give this tranquil work a deeper layer of emotional resonance. Like her mother, Seton also places great value on her intense friendships with women. She profiles older friends who appear to be mother substitutes--Senta, a Swiss embodiment of European dignity, and Ida, a 90-something practicing therapist--as well as an idealized intellectual exchange with her friend Laura. Coming full cycle, Seton finds herself the confidante of a young college woman. Though the quality of these portraits varies, Seton succeeds in conveying the sustenance each relationship gives her. Author tour. (Jan.)