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Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered
“Just my kind of book . . . In addition to some great meals made to satisfy desires, needs, whims or simply to make use of what’s at hand, Jam Today is a complete pleasure to read.” —DEBORAH MADISON, author of The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Warm, conversational, and exquisitely practical, Davies returns to the Jam Today series to share new recipes from her home kitchen—and stories about her experiences cooking for herself and her friends, family, and pets—during the best and worst of times. Whether she’s describing how she set up her kitchen in an RV after a flood, encouraging young feminists to try cooking a baked potato, adapting an M.F.K. Fisher recipe to create “the world’s simplest hollandaise sauce,” or singing the praises of her favorite local food purveyors, her infectious enthusiasm provides inspiration for everyone from trained chefs to those barely able to scramble an egg.
Featuring advice for omnivores and vegetarians alike about how to eat (and what to prepare) to survive natural disasters, cross-country moves, bereavement, holidays-gone-wrong, and even a spontaneous picnic, Jam Today Too provides all the ingredients for daily feeding of mind, body, and soul.
Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, both from The History of Arcadia series, and the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it’s all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being, and in doing so, to rediscover the best of our humanity. Davies lives with her husband and their two dogs, in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado.
Warm, conversational, and exquisitely practical, Davies returns to the Jam Today series to share new recipes from her home kitchen—and stories about her experiences cooking for herself and her friends, family, and pets—during the best and worst of times. Whether she’s describing how she set up her kitchen in an RV after a flood, encouraging young feminists to try cooking a baked potato, adapting an M.F.K. Fisher recipe to create “the world’s simplest hollandaise sauce,” or singing the praises of her favorite local food purveyors, her infectious enthusiasm provides inspiration for everyone from trained chefs to those barely able to scramble an egg.
Featuring advice for omnivores and vegetarians alike about how to eat (and what to prepare) to survive natural disasters, cross-country moves, bereavement, holidays-gone-wrong, and even a spontaneous picnic, Jam Today Too provides all the ingredients for daily feeding of mind, body, and soul.
Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, both from The History of Arcadia series, and the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it’s all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being, and in doing so, to rediscover the best of our humanity. Davies lives with her husband and their two dogs, in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado.
- GenresNonfictionFood
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 5, 2014
1 person is currently reading
222 people want to read
About the author
Tod Davies
12 books18 followersTod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, both from The History of Arcadia series, and the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it’s all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being, and in doing so, to rediscover the best of our humanity. Davies lives with her husband Alex, and their two dogs, in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado.
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July 14, 2014
Jam for All: A Review of Jam Today Too by Tod Davies
As lunchtime approaches for the Saturday crew picking CSA shares at Stonebridge Farm, our field talk turns to food. What to do with the lovely broccoli we’re harvesting; our favorite way to fix kale; our favorite meal from Stonebridge vegetables. For people who love food, chatting about what we like and how we’ll prepare it is almost as much fun as cooking and eating it.
Reading Jam Today Too by Tod Davies (Exterminating Angel Press) is like sharing food stories with a friend across a big bowl of shelling peas. One recipe leads to another until, all of sudden, the bowl is full and so are we. Because food is connected to the people and places we love, talking about food feeds us, too.
A sequel to her earlier Jam Today, JTT includes recipes for disasters, grief, home, friends, feasts, and even eating alone. Each chapter serves up new ideas for how to make the most of ingredients on hand.
But Jam Today Too is not just a cookbook in the compilation-of-recipes sense. As the title of chapter eight makes clear, JTT also offers Food for Thought. In Davies’ words, she writes “to join together sides of life that get artificially separated: as if what you eat every day doesn’t have to do with who you are and where you fit in your world.”
In the grab-and-go cuisine of the US today, food doesn’t seem to count for much. But a counter-movement (or would that be an anti-counter movement, in the case of fast food restaurants where meals are transacted at the counter?) that places food at the center of our lives reminds us to pay attention not only to what we eat, but to how. How do the food choices we make connect us to the health and well-being of our bodies and to the environment upon which we depend?
Over and over, Davies’ stories exemplify the relationships forged through the meals we eat each day. To Davies, meals taste better when you know where the ingredients come from. In “Best Spring Dinner for Two,” for example, she tells us not only what ingredients she used, but from whom they came: “Take out four eggs. These should be eggs from someone like Dawn the Egg Lady, who coddles her chickens in a warm shed built against her house, and feeds them table scraps.” And so on, until not only Dawn, but her husband Doug and their three dogs become characters in a story that concludes, “For some reason those eggs taste best. Don’t ask me why.”
By reading Jam Today Too, we know why. The overarching message of this book is that food matters. As Davies admits, “I love anything that makes something big out of something apparently small.” This is exactly what Jam Today Too teaches us. Food is much bigger than it appears. Food takes us from birth to death, with good times and bad in between, and Davies is there with us for all of it. Food for disasters? Think basics. Food for grieving? Think comfort. Reading about Aunt Celia’s beloved candied pecans and “green mold” prods us to ponder what recipes we’ll leave to loved ones at our own deaths. It’s no surprise that the biggest chapter in JTT is “Food for Home” because “Love and food go together—and they both mean home.”
The subtitle of Jam Today Too is “The Revolution Will Not Be Catered.” By this Davies means that no one should expect to be served by others but rather that we all should pay attention to the ways we can help each other be well. As a farmer, I agree. Safe, nutritious and delicious food should not be the privilege of the affluent in some hyper-individualist ethos, but rather the right of all through community cooperation. And what need is more commonplace than the growing, preparing, and eating of food? Jam Today Too is an antidote to the industrial food lobby’s portrayal of food as inconvenient, irrelevant, and even harmful. Davies’ book reminds us that real food--the kind that nourishes both body and soul—is found in the simplest meals made with love.
As lunchtime approaches for the Saturday crew picking CSA shares at Stonebridge Farm, our field talk turns to food. What to do with the lovely broccoli we’re harvesting; our favorite way to fix kale; our favorite meal from Stonebridge vegetables. For people who love food, chatting about what we like and how we’ll prepare it is almost as much fun as cooking and eating it.
Reading Jam Today Too by Tod Davies (Exterminating Angel Press) is like sharing food stories with a friend across a big bowl of shelling peas. One recipe leads to another until, all of sudden, the bowl is full and so are we. Because food is connected to the people and places we love, talking about food feeds us, too.
A sequel to her earlier Jam Today, JTT includes recipes for disasters, grief, home, friends, feasts, and even eating alone. Each chapter serves up new ideas for how to make the most of ingredients on hand.
But Jam Today Too is not just a cookbook in the compilation-of-recipes sense. As the title of chapter eight makes clear, JTT also offers Food for Thought. In Davies’ words, she writes “to join together sides of life that get artificially separated: as if what you eat every day doesn’t have to do with who you are and where you fit in your world.”
In the grab-and-go cuisine of the US today, food doesn’t seem to count for much. But a counter-movement (or would that be an anti-counter movement, in the case of fast food restaurants where meals are transacted at the counter?) that places food at the center of our lives reminds us to pay attention not only to what we eat, but to how. How do the food choices we make connect us to the health and well-being of our bodies and to the environment upon which we depend?
Over and over, Davies’ stories exemplify the relationships forged through the meals we eat each day. To Davies, meals taste better when you know where the ingredients come from. In “Best Spring Dinner for Two,” for example, she tells us not only what ingredients she used, but from whom they came: “Take out four eggs. These should be eggs from someone like Dawn the Egg Lady, who coddles her chickens in a warm shed built against her house, and feeds them table scraps.” And so on, until not only Dawn, but her husband Doug and their three dogs become characters in a story that concludes, “For some reason those eggs taste best. Don’t ask me why.”
By reading Jam Today Too, we know why. The overarching message of this book is that food matters. As Davies admits, “I love anything that makes something big out of something apparently small.” This is exactly what Jam Today Too teaches us. Food is much bigger than it appears. Food takes us from birth to death, with good times and bad in between, and Davies is there with us for all of it. Food for disasters? Think basics. Food for grieving? Think comfort. Reading about Aunt Celia’s beloved candied pecans and “green mold” prods us to ponder what recipes we’ll leave to loved ones at our own deaths. It’s no surprise that the biggest chapter in JTT is “Food for Home” because “Love and food go together—and they both mean home.”
The subtitle of Jam Today Too is “The Revolution Will Not Be Catered.” By this Davies means that no one should expect to be served by others but rather that we all should pay attention to the ways we can help each other be well. As a farmer, I agree. Safe, nutritious and delicious food should not be the privilege of the affluent in some hyper-individualist ethos, but rather the right of all through community cooperation. And what need is more commonplace than the growing, preparing, and eating of food? Jam Today Too is an antidote to the industrial food lobby’s portrayal of food as inconvenient, irrelevant, and even harmful. Davies’ book reminds us that real food--the kind that nourishes both body and soul—is found in the simplest meals made with love.
June 8, 2014
To Tod Davies, food is the great connector. It connects people to other people and to oneself. In JAM TODAY TOO, she explores this concept though conversational essays dealing with food during disasters (in her case, floods which destroyed her kitchen), grief, home, friends, feasts, and herself alone.
There are seventy two recipes included, all listed at the beginning, but they are not presented in typical cookbook fashion. Some are strictly in essay form. The ones that follow the usual form–list of ingredients, preparation–are augmented by detailed information about how to pick the ingredients and how to prepare them.
She lists staples that she always keeps at home as well as telling the reader what tempts her to purchase something else. (Often, it is the price.) Many of the recipes are vegetarian, as is her husband, and she offers advice about preparing one meal to meet the needs of people with varying tastes and needs. She suggests nine ways to use leftover rice.
Along the way, she talks about ecology. Regarding calamari she says, “I know they are sustainable...at least they are for the moment, who knows for how much longer with those computer-driven industrial-sized nets dragging every inch of the deep sea floor these days?”
She encourages people to experiment: During the Irish Potato Famine, people starved to death because there were no potatoes, their primary food. There was abundant seafood and seaweed in the sea around the island but since seafood was low-class, they never thought of eating it or giving it to their children. Likewise, in the American West, when locusts ate the harvest and coyotes came and attacked people for food, the people ate shoe leather. They didn’t eat the protein-rich locusts or the coyotes they shot. Tod Davies had never tried kale until encouraged to do so by her friends. Afterwards she wondered, “How many other assumptions, ruts, and blind spots are all around, trapping me in a life that is less rich than the one I could have if I opened up a bit more?”
“When something goes wrong, don’t panic. It can always be fixed. And sometimes the fix is much better...than the perfection I set out to achieve.”
We meet some of her friends and learn how she made new friends. Reading the book, made me think about some of my own cooking memories: Cabbage borscht my mother cooked. First cut veal chops I accidently bought but was afraid to cook because they were expensive and I didn’t know how to cook them without ruining it. Four bunches of radishes my husband bought when I wanted only one. Harry & David’s Rivera Pears.
There are several recipes and foods I plan to try. For those that I won’t be trying because of my own food restrictions, I enjoyed reading them and considered ways to adapt them.
Reading the book was more like a friendly visit rather than looking at a cold instruction manual. My main complaint is that too many of the recipes called for the same ingredients. While onions, carrots, and potatoes are staples most people have at home, I would have liked a bit more variety. But that may have been deliberate on her part to make the book more user-friendly.
I received this book as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer.
There are seventy two recipes included, all listed at the beginning, but they are not presented in typical cookbook fashion. Some are strictly in essay form. The ones that follow the usual form–list of ingredients, preparation–are augmented by detailed information about how to pick the ingredients and how to prepare them.
She lists staples that she always keeps at home as well as telling the reader what tempts her to purchase something else. (Often, it is the price.) Many of the recipes are vegetarian, as is her husband, and she offers advice about preparing one meal to meet the needs of people with varying tastes and needs. She suggests nine ways to use leftover rice.
Along the way, she talks about ecology. Regarding calamari she says, “I know they are sustainable...at least they are for the moment, who knows for how much longer with those computer-driven industrial-sized nets dragging every inch of the deep sea floor these days?”
She encourages people to experiment: During the Irish Potato Famine, people starved to death because there were no potatoes, their primary food. There was abundant seafood and seaweed in the sea around the island but since seafood was low-class, they never thought of eating it or giving it to their children. Likewise, in the American West, when locusts ate the harvest and coyotes came and attacked people for food, the people ate shoe leather. They didn’t eat the protein-rich locusts or the coyotes they shot. Tod Davies had never tried kale until encouraged to do so by her friends. Afterwards she wondered, “How many other assumptions, ruts, and blind spots are all around, trapping me in a life that is less rich than the one I could have if I opened up a bit more?”
“When something goes wrong, don’t panic. It can always be fixed. And sometimes the fix is much better...than the perfection I set out to achieve.”
We meet some of her friends and learn how she made new friends. Reading the book, made me think about some of my own cooking memories: Cabbage borscht my mother cooked. First cut veal chops I accidently bought but was afraid to cook because they were expensive and I didn’t know how to cook them without ruining it. Four bunches of radishes my husband bought when I wanted only one. Harry & David’s Rivera Pears.
There are several recipes and foods I plan to try. For those that I won’t be trying because of my own food restrictions, I enjoyed reading them and considered ways to adapt them.
Reading the book was more like a friendly visit rather than looking at a cold instruction manual. My main complaint is that too many of the recipes called for the same ingredients. While onions, carrots, and potatoes are staples most people have at home, I would have liked a bit more variety. But that may have been deliberate on her part to make the book more user-friendly.
I received this book as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer.
June 14, 2014
Jam Today Too by Tod Davies is a collection of food and eating-related...I wouldn't quite call them essays, that is too formal. They would be more accurately described as thoughts, missives, meditations, wisdom. Whatever they are, they are delightful and simply dripping with personality. If I ever need a reminder of what it is to have a strong, identifiable, likeable voice in a book, this is the book I will turn to.
The book is organized into chapters that are each a life situation in which food is important: disasters, grief, home, when with friends, when alone, etc. Within these chapters are the nebulous and loosely organized musings I desperately attempt to describe above. Some are distinct, others bleed into one another, and still others are grouped around something - a single event or a single vegetable, for instance.
There are recipes, but most are not laid out in a way that one would recognize as a recipe. It is almost as if you are peeking into the food and cooking journal that Davies mentions she kept as a young cook. It is pleasant to read, but seems it would be difficult to cook from. Still, I'm going to give it a go because many of the recipes sound absolutely delicious. Davies is a self-described carnivore while her husband is often referred to as the Beloved Vegetarian, and so she presents us with recipes for both the meat-loving and the meat-eschewing.
I found a lack of a cohesive story (anything that one would call plot) that though it did not lessen my enjoyment, would make me hesitate in calling the book a memoir. And so, instead of sitting down to read it as such, I would suggest reading it in short sittings, whenever you feel the need to be enveloped by the kind, funny, and wise presence of an old friend.
The book is organized into chapters that are each a life situation in which food is important: disasters, grief, home, when with friends, when alone, etc. Within these chapters are the nebulous and loosely organized musings I desperately attempt to describe above. Some are distinct, others bleed into one another, and still others are grouped around something - a single event or a single vegetable, for instance.
There are recipes, but most are not laid out in a way that one would recognize as a recipe. It is almost as if you are peeking into the food and cooking journal that Davies mentions she kept as a young cook. It is pleasant to read, but seems it would be difficult to cook from. Still, I'm going to give it a go because many of the recipes sound absolutely delicious. Davies is a self-described carnivore while her husband is often referred to as the Beloved Vegetarian, and so she presents us with recipes for both the meat-loving and the meat-eschewing.
I found a lack of a cohesive story (anything that one would call plot) that though it did not lessen my enjoyment, would make me hesitate in calling the book a memoir. And so, instead of sitting down to read it as such, I would suggest reading it in short sittings, whenever you feel the need to be enveloped by the kind, funny, and wise presence of an old friend.
December 31, 2014
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the author’s voice is quite likable. She reads like a sweet Nana who loves spending time with good food and good people. She is a big proponent of cooking with what you have on hand, which I agree with. Problem is, the what-she-has-on-hand seems to be things I would never have in my kitchen like octopus, squid, lamb and seaweed. So, even though she peppers all her recipes with fun anecdotal stories, I felt myself fighting to not skim at times. I felt bad about it too.. because I really did feel like the author was a dear friend, and that I would be hurting her feelings by not reading the whole thing.
There were some pages that I bookmarked for future reference and a few recipes were included that I would probably try, but I don’t see this food memoir/cookbook being something that I pick up again and again.
Would I recommend this to my BFF? No. If she had time to read a food memoir/cookbook, I’d recommend Bread and Wine.
Would I recommend this to my teen daughter? No. I don’t think it would hold her interest.
There were some pages that I bookmarked for future reference and a few recipes were included that I would probably try, but I don’t see this food memoir/cookbook being something that I pick up again and again.
Would I recommend this to my BFF? No. If she had time to read a food memoir/cookbook, I’d recommend Bread and Wine.
Would I recommend this to my teen daughter? No. I don’t think it would hold her interest.
December 31, 2017
I loved the subtitle The Revolution will Not be Catered. Revolutionaries seldom think about food and usually expect the women to do the cooking. The book is organized into life circumstances and the foods that might be appropriate to them. The recipes are arranged more as stories within the stories she's telling, rather than lists of ingredients. Her description of how to build a basic pantry was spot on. I loved her approach to the importance of eating locally and sustainably. She's at her best when she stays at the local level. Broader pronouncements aren't her strength. I was disappointed she repeated the old story about the Irish and fish (the English hanged poachers, so fish wasn't an option to solved the famine.)
June 10, 2014
Jam Today Too is a memoir of great meals, and it’s revolutionary, spiritual, and funny. Organized around food for different life events--food for disasters, grief, home, friends and feasts food for oneself (and, of course, food for thought), Davies’s book encourages us begin to find balance in our lives by paying attention to the food we eat. Taking responsibility for our food is the first step to taking responsibility for our lives and the world around us. The book is revolutionary but not didactic. It’s a memoir of great meals, by an author who knows her food and knows how to find a great meal any place.
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October 15, 2014Both this and the first volume, Jam Today, have a curiously British and almost too twee accent for a person who seems to be American. Honestly, with her pair of homes in rural Oregon and on a mountain in Colorado, with her bookish life and easy access to gorgeous ingredients and folksy tone, I wanted to resist. But the woman makes you hungry. And she cooks in ways that will make you want to cook, a game of connect-the-dots of what's on hand and what you are hungry for and how much time you are willing to spend on it.
March 12, 2016
I loved Jam Today and I love Jam Today Too. Jam Today freed me to be a real cook. Tod Davies is the kind of cook that inspires others to bravely cook and that’s what she did for me. She doesn’t limit herself to insipidly following a recipe and I like that. So happy I went back for more Jam Today in this book two. I recommend it. Jam Today Too will make you a better cook and, somehow, a better, freer person.
May 25, 2014
This is the first book I've read by this author and I loved it! I really enjoyed the stories that went along with each recipe telling how the recipe originated. I got some really great new food ideas and it was interesting seeing what others tried to keep all the time in their refrigerator. Now I look at mine and say "What can I make with this" instead of "I don't have anything to cook with."
FTC disclosure: I received this book free from Goodreads hoping I would review it.
FTC disclosure: I received this book free from Goodreads hoping I would review it.
July 12, 2014
I won this book in a giveaway and I'm glad I did. It's a cute little book, part memoir, part cookbook. The book is divided into sections like "food for disasters," "food for grief," "food for feasts," etc. Each recipe is preceded by a story that details how the recipe came about. I especially liked the parts detailing what you should always keep in your kitchen, and how to throw meals together with what little you have on hand. Can't wait to try some of the recipes!
August 8, 2014
I won this book. I wasn't sure what to expect. I like the format of stories intertwined with recipes!
July 16, 2014
I won this book in a goodreads giveaway.
This was a warm and thoughtful book on food and cooking and how it shapes us.
This was a warm and thoughtful book on food and cooking and how it shapes us.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews