At Home on the Range

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. 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. There are some retro favourites, but most of the recipes have a modern feel, and her bracing common-sense approach to cheaper cuts and leftovers is right on the button Sally Hughes, BBC Good Food Magazine Hilarious and has sections with blissful titles such as Weekend Guests without a Weakened Hostess English Home ***** Margaret Yardley Potter wrote At Home on the Range almost a generation before Julia Child. She was, explains Gilbert, way ahead of her time, being intrigued by the history of food, an early advocate of farmers' markets and a woman who persuaded an Italian shop keeper in Philadelphia in 1918 to teach her how to make pizza The Lady