At Home on the Range

"A cookbook for modern times and modern cooks, full of sassy jokes and smartly written recipes" (Bon Appetit).

"This book is a beautiful time capsule that looks back to the roots of American gastronomy, when the values of gardening and fresh ingredients were the primary inspiration. Margaret Yardley Potter's warm, witty stories and recipes show us that our great-grandmothers instinctually understood that food is central to a life well-lived." —Alice Waters

Recently, while moving into a new house, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. She discovered a book called At Home on the Range (or, How to Make Friends with Your Stove) by Gilbert's great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter, and soon found that she had stumbled upon a book far ahead of its time. In her workaday cookbook, Potter espoused the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish, and German), derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated new epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickles and pork. She travels to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious they must be "devoured in a silence almost devout." Part scholar, part crusader, Potter reveals the source of Gilbert's love of food, and her warm, infectious prose.

Featuring a comprehensive and moving introduction from Elizabeth Gilbert, At Home on the Range is an eminently usable and humorous cookbook. But it's also more than that: it's an heirloom, an into-the-wee-hours dinner with relatives and ancestors, a perfect gift for anybody with a stove or a mother.

"Both artifact and artfully useful . . .We're not surprised that Gilbert, who celebrates her "Gima" throughout, comes from such feisty stock." —Oprah Magazine

"For pure reading pleasure, try Margaret Yardley Potter, otherwise knowns as the memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert's great-grandmother . . . Adventurous and funny, she could have drunk and smoked Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher and probably even Dorothy Parker under the table." —New York Times Book Review