Bread & Water: Essays

2025 SLA One Book, One Province Selection

Awarded Gold at the 2022 Taste Canada Award

The lyricism of Bread & Water interweaves culinary insights and literary essays to pose fundamental questions about how we live--and how we feed--the larger hungers that motivate our lives.

"When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it..." --MFK Fisher

When chef and writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith left the city for rural life on a farm in Saskatchewan, she planned to replace cooking and teaching with poetry and prose. But--as begin the best stories--her next adventure didn't quite work that way.

Food trickled into her poems, her essays, her fiction. And water poured into her property in both Saskatchewan and Calgary during two devastating floods.

Bread & Water uses lyrical prose to examine those two fundamental ingredients, and to probe the essential questions on how to live a life. Hobsbawn-Smith uses food to explore the hungers of the human soul: wilder hungers that loiter beyond cravings for love. She kneads themes of floods and place, grief and loss; the commonalities of refugees and Canadians through common tastes in food; cooking methods, grandmothers and mentors; the politics of local and sustainable food; parenting; male privilege in the restaurant world; and the challenges of aging gracefully.

It is an elegant collection that weaves joy into exploring the quotidian in search for larger meaning.