Moira Hodgson

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food
Nan Talese/Doubleday

Hodgson (Good Food from a Small Kitchen)—a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and currently working at the New York Observer—has led a rich and colorful life, from sipping tea with Paul Bowles in Tangier to hanging out in the kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. Her memoir begins with childhood reminiscences of wartime rationing; a pared-down recipe for sponge cake is the first of several culinary sidebars that become progressively elaborate. Recalling her romance with W.S. Merwin, for example, she describes the quesadillas cooked by their neighbor in Mexico; when she has Diana Trilling and Virgil Thomson over to her apartment for dinner, she serves roast leg of lamb with anchovies. Take away all the famous names and her father’s constant travel required by his diplomatic career (which she would later discover was a cover for his real job as a British spy), and Hodgson’s emotional drama is straightforward and easily recognizable, from chafing against the restraints of boarding school to coping with the death of her parents. A highly charming raconteur, Hodgson’s combination of sparkling anecdotes and tempting recipes is likely to win over foodies.
Currently a New York Observer columnist, Hodgson was born after World War II to a British Foreign Service officer and his elegant wife. Due to her father’s diverse postings, the author advanced from an English childhood ingesting food laced with suet to swimming in the Suez with the international set. She lived in Beirut and Stockholm, prewar Vietnam and postwar Berlin, tasting all the local fare. Leaving public school in Dorset, the tall teenager sailed to New York on the Queen Mary. Since her father worked at the United Nations, Hodgson became a UN guide, part of a convivial multinational circle. Episodes like being flung onto the Persian carpet by an amorous Iranian diplomat hastened the pretty young Englishwoman’s coming of age. She acquired boyfriends, took ballet classes and waited tables in Greenwich Village. Instead of toad-in-the-hole, she ate oysters; tajine and couscous replaced bangers and Marmite. During the ’70s, she led a bohemian life in Paris and Mexico, dallying with handsome dancer Claudio and sustaining a long-term relationship with poet William. (No surname is provided, but readers will have no difficulty identifying that Pulitzer Prize winner). Hodgson’s occasional recollections of memorable meals generally lead to anecdotes. She intersperses recipes like cloves in a ham, but her stories of exotic places and curious people provide at least as much entertainment as the tasty dishes. Pertinent comments assess the craft of a culinary critic and the food foibles of the famous. (When poet W.H. Auden woke up in the middle of the night, for example, he “liked to console himself with a cold spud.”) The author sweetly and smartly depicts her family and renders all her adventures with real descriptive power and an ear for language. A jolly good memoir, served with savoir-faire.