Hungry Heart by Clare Finney

A soul-searching memoir for foodies everywhere. Let award-winning food writer Clare Finney take you on a passionate exploration of food and love.

From family feasts to comfort food, first dates to office cake; how does what we eat define us, and the relationships we have with others?

In Hungry Heart award-winning food writer Clare Finney investigates the role that food plays in modern society, exploring how eating unites us in varied ways throughout our lives. Starting with her own childhood spent in her grandmother’s hotel kitchen, she reflects on the food that has shaped the person she is today, through the lens of fourteen memorable recipes.

Think of the dance of culinary courtship entailed in dating. Or the funeral foods that remind us of the connections between life and death, Finney examines the power of food
and drink to attract, bind and define us—and of course, its power to divide and repel. Packed with transformative stories from the heart, this book may just change your
relationship with food, dining and mealtimes. At a time when our relationship towards what, when and where we eat has become increasingly complicated, Hungry Heart is a
feast. It’s an honest, heart-warming account of humans breaking bread together and what that really means.

My thoughts:

Thank you to Anne of Random Things Tours and to Aurum Press for the opportunity to join the paperback publication blog tour for Hungry Heart by Clare Finney.

Regular readers of my book reviews will know that I don’t often review nonfiction books but this one caught my eye. I loved learning to bake and cook when young with my mum and Nan, and I considered training to be a dietitian when in my teens.

I loved how Clare shared her own experiences of how food has featured in her life, including a very honest conversation about her avoidance of food for a number of years. Clare also shares details about how food has been important to friends, family and colleagues in many different ways.

We all have different relationships with food at different stages of our lives. I can remember being a child who enjoyed eating Angel Delight finding it less tasty as an adult when introducing it to her own children.

The book reminded me of meals long forgotten, with people who are no longer in my life today but whom I enjoyed sitting around a table with. I love the section at the end inviting the reader to note down different meals/food stories – I may need to break my rule of not writing in a book to do this.

Happy to recommend this beautifully written and thought provoking book. Just be aware that you will feel constantly hungry when reading it.

Author Bio:

Clare Finney is an award-winning food writer – Fortnum and Mason Food Writer of the Year 2019 – and author of The Female Chef, which won Fortnum and Mason’s Debut Food Book Award in 2022.

Born in London in 1988 and unhappily educated at an all-
girls school, she spent large stretches of the school holidays in her grandparents’ large hotel kitchen on the south coast. There, food and love were inextricable; yet it wasn’t until after university that she fell in love with food writing itself, whilst working for Borough Market’s magazine. Today her food journalism appears regularly in the Guardian, the Evening Standard, delicious magazine, Vogue, the Telegraph and the iPaper, amongst many other titles. She writes about sustainability, food and relationships, producers, food and feminism, trends in food culture, and cheese.
IG: @finneyclare