We are excited to host Martin Sorge and his cookbook, “Great Bakes”!
Martin Sorge, winner of The Great American Baking Show, guides readers through more than 100 recipes for sweet and savory bakes that celebrate the bounty of the Midwest, from modern classics to innovative show-stoppers. Celebrate Autumn with us!
Join us for this event on Saturday, at 5pm at Bay Books of Suttons Bay (220 N St Joseph Street). We look forward to seeing you and tasting great delights.
Registration is 10.00 and can be made at baybooksmi.com/events
Author Interview
On your nightstand now: The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh, and Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing, by Anna Ansari. Yes, all three are on my nightstand right now. Each of these books are about food, but also more than that. West’s book teaches about vegetable gardening and provides recipes for the product. Tandoh’s evocative writing explores what drives our appetites these days. Ansari is a masterful writer, researcher, and cook, and she shines light on what she calls Asia’s “flyover country.” Anna was in Traverse City for the Food & Wine festival, and we had a great chat about cookbooks. She’s wonderful, and her personality comes through in her writing so well.
Favorite book when you were a child: Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, no contest.
Your top five authors: Oh boy. This is a tough one Tennessee Williams, because I just adore his plays and short stories—iconic queer-toned Americana; Ray Bradbury, because that old-school science fiction sparked my love for the genre; Nigella Lawson’s sensual yet practical way of talking about food gives me something to aspire to; Frank O’Hara’s poetry is so modern at times touching, funny, and joyfully queer; Meera Sodha, because her recipes manage to be approachable, packed with flavor, and thrilling, plus I just adore cooking and eating South Asian food.
Book you’ve faked reading: Daisy Miller by Henry James. I was assigned it for a college English course my senior year of college. I read a few pages and then decided against finishing it. (I still aced the class.)
Book you’re an evangelist for: Existential Bread by Jim Franks, a book about bread written in verse: funny, smart, and perfect. (There’s also an audiobook version set to music.)
Book you’ve bought for the cover: I have purchased British versions of a few Ottolenghi cookbooks, like Simple because I preferred the graphic British cover over the American version with a photograph on the cover. My love for graphic and illustrated covers led me to ask for an illustrated cover for my own cookbook.
Book you hid from your parents: Honestly, I don’t think I ever hid a book from my family. We are a big reading family, so some books probably hid in piles on my floor, but not intentionally.
Book that changed your life: My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, by Jim Lahey. Jim’s book got me hooked on baking, and the rest is history. The best book for any beginning bread baker.
Favorite line from a book: “oh Lana Turner we love you get up” from “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” by Frank O’Hara
Five books you’ll never part with: Bravetart by Stella Parks, my signed copy of Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and my Riverside Shakespeare.
Book you most want to read again for the first time: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Someone suggested that book to me in high school. I read it over the summer before I started college, and it blew my mind. The images in that book really shatter your sense of what is possible.
Do you have any bookstore rituals? I go straight for the cookbooks. I can always tell if there’s a cookbook or food lover who buys the books. That’s one reason I adore Bay Books—an excellent cookbook section. Next, I hop over to the staff recommendations section to see what they’re loving right now—that’s where I usually grab new fiction or non-food-related nonfiction books. Oh, and I always peruse poetry, because we need more poetry in our lives.
