The splendidly meandering narrative reads like a long dinner party with plenty of wine as Madison tells of cooking for M.F.K. Fisher’s birthday and working with Mark Miller, Richard Olney, David Tanis, Judy Rodgers and Waters, with whom she remains great friends.

... thoughtful and thought-provoking.

This disarming memoir, An Onion in My Pocket, is full of surprises. For a start, it’s not generally known that for almost 20 years [the author] was an ordained Buddhist in a monastic community. Or, that when she was a child, her parents refused to buy her Twinkies, so she stole them. She never had a TV dinner. She never had a TV.

While Madison could not have known that her book would be published into a world changed by a pandemic, reading it in this context makes the frustration ever more urgent: If the person who has most famously advocated for a vegetarian diet can’t wholeheartedly endorse it, then what hope is there for significant change to the American obsession with meat?.

... honest, beguiling.

Madison, who opened one of the first vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco in the late 1970s, here focuses on her time practicing Buddhism as well as her growing interest in cooking and working in restaurants.

As if her writing were a meal, she moves from topic to topic like a diner enjoying her segue from course to course. Readers will enjoy her amiability and learn much from her ruminations, including the advice to 'break your plans in the face of something wonderful and unexpected, like [discovering] morels. Let this food rule take over and push you here and there as it will.'.

Chapters covering the 'twenty missing years' —after [the renowned vegetarian chef] left the SFZC, Greens, and her monastic Buddhist life—build on the tension between abstinence and abundance, hunger and satiation, and anticipation and enjoyment of food and life. Madison’s richly told story will resonate with foodies of all stripes..