Tiny Moons: connecting comfort reading and comfort eating
The legacy of food, cooking, home and family recipes passed down through generations that is present in so many cultures, and highlighted in Nina Mingya Powles’ ‘Tiny Moons’, seems at first to be missing from my life and possibly even in England as a country. Our food is pretty plain, the exciting elements of our cuisine a meld of other cultures and scorned by most of the foodie world.
And yet English food is the food of my childhood and so is inherently comforting.
A Sunday roast, a chippy tea, an afternoon tea, an English breakfast.
These foods are home for me. And the foods Powles eats, makes and worships in Shanghai is the food of home, family and culture for her. Even though most of those foods I’ve never been lucky enough to try, reading ‘Tiny Moons’ gave me that same level of comfort and escapism that eating a familiar meal and re-reading a familiar book does.
Food is the language that defies language, that doesn’t need language to make it work, to make it home, to make it comforting. And yet the actual language of food and the naming of things can bring that comfort and escapism too. It’s also a part of the history and culture of food and as I was re-reading ‘Tiny Moons’ I started to wonder if language, reading and food fed each organically and cyclically.
Food is comforting in how it takes you back home, and books are comforting in the way that they whisk you away from home, but they both provide comfort in the escapism that they allow. They both encourage you to travel through time, space, memories, and fantasy. Food writing and food memoir deliver all of these things simultaneously as the pinnacle of comfort for me, and this was cemented with my re-read of ‘Tiny Moons’ this month.
On Nina Mingya Powles year abroad in Shanghai sh explores how the food of her childhood in the city mingles with her life in New Zealand, and how they both intersect with time spent with her family in Malaysia. All three of these places have different foods, different traditions and different languages, and yet they are all home to Powles. While Shanghai has a lot of memories and foods of home, it’s also a very new experience and she spends the book exploring her memories of the three countries she has called home and the foods and languages that define those places.
‘Tiny Moon’s is a gorgeous little book and if you need a comfort read, a book to take you on travels around the world or make you salivate with hunger, this is truly the one for you. It’ll warm your heart and make you long for travels and home.
Join us live on Instagram at 7pm GMT as we discuss ‘Tiny Moons’ for our February #BookClubbers pick.
You can buy ‘Tiny Moons’ from our bookshop.org affiliate link here.
Written by Sophie
