Summary
_______________ 'Ideal for those who like their recipes to come with a back story ... The book is tremendously funny, and her cooking was way ahead of her time' - Sally Hughes, BBC Good Food Magazine 'Hilarious' - English Home _______________ Recently, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardbacks was a book called At Home on the Range , written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. As Gilbert writes in her Foreword: 'I jumped up and dashed through the house to find my husband, so I could read parts of it to him: Listen to this! The humor! The insight! The sophistication! Then I followed him around the kitchen while he was making our dinner (lamb shanks), and I continued reading aloud as we ate... By the end of the night there were three of us sitting at that table. Gima had come to join us, and she was wonderful, and I was in love.' The cookbook was far ahead of its time. In it, Potter espouses the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish and German), derides preservatives and culinary shortcuts and generally celebrates a devotion to epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious, she says, they must be 'devoured in a silence almost devout'. Part scholar and part crusader for a more open food conversation than currently existed, it's not hard to see where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited both her love of food and her warm, infectious prose. At Home on the Range is a fascinating, humorous and useful cookbook from the past that is essential for the present day.
Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut on July 18, 1969. She received an undergraduate degree in political science from New York University. After college, she spent several years traveling around the country, working odd jobs and writing short stories. Early in her career, she also worked as a journalist for such publications as Spin, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. An article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bartending on the Lower East Side eventually became the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly.
She writes both fiction and nonfiction and her books include the short story collection Pilgrims, Stern Men, The Last American Man, Committed, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, and The Signature of All Things. Her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, was adapted into a movie starring Julia Roberts. She will be featured at the Sydney Writers Festival in March 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
