Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions

Chef Tangorra debuts with an appetizing memoir-in-essays about love, loss, and lasagna. Growing up on Long Island in the 1990s, Tangorra was an insecure girl scarred by her parents’ acrimonious divorce, who discovered during treasured restaurant dinners that food could be a “vehicle for magic.” After surviving a near-fatal bus crash at 22, Tangorra recalls having a “fire and brimstone” moment that pushed her to open her own restaurant. That culminated, four years later, with Brucie, an Italian café in Brooklyn that became locally beloved for its lasagna even as it proved financially unstable. Throughout, Tangorra writes of food as a force that connects her to loved ones: she prepares a roast beef sandwich for her cancer-ridden father in hospice; at the Tuscan yoga retreat where she falls in love with a noncommittal man named David, she woos him by preparing spaghetti limone and other intricate pasta dishes. The dalliance with David doesn’t last, but Tangorra’s culinary passions prove a constant companion, and readers who get palpitations at the thought of making the perfect marinara will savor her reflections. It’s a nourishing self-portrait. Agent: Jamie Carr, Book Group. (Apr.)