Bread & Water

"This marvelous collection situates the chef-writer within the lauded tradition of authentic food writing. Hobsbawn-Smith belongs in the same vaulted company as the iconic American food writer, M.F.K. Fisher." ~Winnipeg Free Press

"An eloquent, lively contemplation of food and its myriad connections to life." ~Alice Major

"[Bread & Water] will send you back to your own kitchen to do it with care, gratitude, and love." ~Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement

"dee’s passions for the visceral stuff of life—food, cooking, love, running, loving, grieving—beckon us all to the table." ~Jennifer Cockrall-King, author of Food and the City

"Food is a wonderful agent for storytelling – each ingredient tells a story, each dish is a living history, each eater shares the act of eating with passion – and Bread & Water demonstrates this brilliantly: Hobsbawn-Smith’s writing is generous, loving, and nostalgic without being saccharine. Most importantly, she shows that food is more than what we eat." ~Quill and Quire (Starred Review)

"[dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s] words are luminescent on the page, weaving together images and stories I won’t soon forget. No matter where you are, her words feel like home." ~Renée Kohlman, author of All the Sweet Things and Vegetables

"It will come as no surprise to readers of wildness rushing in that dee Hobsbawn-Smith is also an accomplished chef. Here is a feast of tastes and flavours arriving from many regions and nooks of existence, served up with a wisdom that knows its wordless ‘loveliness in loss’ equally with its sharp jolts of awe." ~Don McKay, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip

"Written with heart and intelligence, Bread & Water: Essays is continually entertaining and rewarding. The tone—self-aware, curious, a little vulnerable—is at once individual and communal, and creates a winning humility perfectly suited to the essays’ explorative nature." ~Judge Tim Bowling, SK Writers’ Guild 2014 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award