The first line from Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good, by Kathleen Finn, is “I’m Swedish, which makes me sexy, and I’m Irish which makes me want to talk about it.” Thus begins a multi-generational memoir of one family’s culinary heritage, replete with recipes. In the late 1950s, her parents left Michigan to help her Irish uncle run an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. They returned to the Midwest to live on a run-down farm, where the family led a hand-to-mouth existence. However, between the chickens they raised and produce they grew, the family never lacked for good food. In fact, cooking was the conduit through which previous generations of her working-class family expressed their love toward one another. Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good is a humorous and flavorful tale spanning three generations.  Brimming with tasty anecdotes about her Uncle Clarence’s divine Cornflake-crusted fried chicken, Grandpa Charles’s spicy San Antonio Chili, and Grandma Inez’s birthday-only cinnamon rolls, Flinn shows how meals can be memories and how cooking can be communication.