The twenty-first annual Taste Canada Awards / Les Lauréats des Saveurs du Canada shortlist has been announced, and among the shortlisted titles in the Culinary Narratives category is award-winning journalist and bestselling author Jan Wong’s Apron Strings: Navigating Food and Family in France, Italy, and China, published by Goose Lane Editions.
Taste Canada is a champion of cookbook authors and food bloggers who explore culinary themes from a Canadian perspective. This year, 91 books and 50 blogs competed in several Taste Canada Awards categories, including the Culinary Narratives category for food- or beverage-related stories, memoirs, or biographies exploring themes ranging broadly from culinary history to politics to social awareness.
"A sharp-minded—and famously sharp-tongued—reporter drags her fully grown, chef-trained son on a homestay cooking tour of France, Italy, and China. What could possibly not go wrong? Inquisitive, caustic, delicious, and can’t-look-away entertaining, this is Jan Wong at the peak of her powers."
— Top Chef Canada
Jan Wong knows food is better when it’s shared, so when she set out to research home cooking in three countries known for their distinctive cuisine, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious. The book was longlisted for the prestigious 2018 RBC Taylor Prize and New Brunswick Book Awards.
“Maybe the world could use one more culinary memoir, after all. Possibly even more, if they’re all as good as this one.”
— Toronto Star
Apron Strings by Jan Wong is shortlisted alongside Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic by Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal), 9000 Years of Wine by Rod Phillips (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Markham), Icon: Flagship Wines from British Columbia’s Best Wineries by John Schreiner (TouchWood Editions, Victoria), and Vij by Vikram Vij (Penguin Canada, Toronto).
Winners, selected by a jury of volunteers from Canada’s culinary profession, will be announced on October 29 at the Taste Canada Awards Gala held at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto.
Jan Wong is the author of five non-fiction bestsellers, including Out of the Blue and Red China Blues, which was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of 1996. (Twenty years later, the book is still in print.) She has won numerous journalism awards (too many to mention!) and is now a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University. A third-generation Canadian, Jan Wong is the eldest daughter of a prominent Montreal restaurateur. To learn more about the author, visit janwong.ca.
To learn more about the book, click here.
