A Table Full of Love
Skye McAlpine
Bloomsbury, £25, 319 pages
At first glance, I thought that Skye McAlpine’s A Table Full of Love might be some kind of theological work on the Eucharist – or at least a supplementary document to the Synod on Synodality – but then I caught sight of the longer subtitle: “recipes to comfort, seduce, celebrate and everything in between”. Perhaps one for the moral theologians, then, if any of them are on their way to the kitchen.
It is, however, more than a recipe book. McAlpine opens by explaining in her introduction – “Some Thoughts on Love and Food” – that “this is a book about love, the different kinds of love that permeate and underpin our world, that make life richer, more complex, at times more painful, often happier; the kinds of love that ultimately make life worth living”. Her subdivisions are not quite the ones that the nuns taught us about at school.
