A Mouthful of Stars by Kim Sunée

Emma Christensen
Emma Christensen
Emma is a former editor for The Kitchn and a graduate of the Cambridge School for Culinary Arts. She is the author of True Brews and Brew Better Beer. Check out her website for more cooking stories
updated May 2, 2019
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The angle: Itching for a plane ticket, but stuck at your desk? Let Kim Sunée take you around the world and share her most memorable meals.

Recipes for right now: Pork Belly Korean-Style BBQ, Vegetable Couscous with Lamb Sausage, Avocado-Almond Ice Cream, Savory Tomato and Pesto Bread Pudding, Crab and Pork Spanish Tortilla, Saffron Cardamom Buns

Who would enjoy this book? Restless souls and adventurous spirits with a hunger for new cuisine.

1 / 5

Quick Facts

• Who wrote it: Kim Sunée

• Who published it: Andrews McMeel

• Other highlights: This cookbook is unlike any other I’ve encountered and that alone makes it instantly enchanting. Kim Sunée has lived a pretty remarkable life — she’s a Korean orphan, adopted by a couple in the US and raised in New Orleans, who then went on to live in Sweden and France with sojourns to all points around the globe. A Mouthful of Stars is partly a memoir of what those travels meant to her, partly a diary of foods loved and savored, and partly a cookbook so those memories can be shared.

This cookbook is deeply personal without feeling overly precious or nostalgic — a balance that I find few cookbooks exploring “world cuisine” are able achieve. This one feels genuine. It feels inviting. It’s a book to take to the couch for a weekend of reading and then into the kitchen for some serious cooking.

The chapters in the book touch on all of Kim Sunée’s major points of travel (and occasionally, points of residence): Korea, North Africa, India, Mexico, Provence and Paris, Norway and Sweden, the U.S. South, and Italy. But the recipes in these chapters are less about odes to a particular place and more about Kim’s experiences there. You may never see these recipes on any menu, but they still have the flavor and spirit of the place that inspired them.

Find the book at your local library, independent bookstore, or Amazon: A Mouthful of Stars by Kim Sunée

Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.

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