The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage

Wildly diverse voices with two things in common: a love of good food and a love of family, even if both of those loves sometimes show themselves in unexpected ways. It's as hard to stop at one essay as it is to stop at one French fry, and each one will have you thinking about how you feed, and are fed by, the ones you love. --KJ Dell'Antonia, lead writer and editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times <br> Caroline Grant and Lisa Harper are on to something with this collection, something left out of polemics about how to eat and the faddish coverage of food in much of the media: that everyone's understanding of food and flavor and of how to feed themselves is a deeply personal set of preferences and prejudices, forged over years and tempered by the parts of our lives spent away from the table as much as those at it. The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage brings together a talented and diverse group of writers, and through their appealingly wide-ranging essays, each shares stories--emotional, funny, revealing--about their relationship to food and the way food shapes their relationship to the world. These stories aren't just about what we eat, but also about how those choices help us understand who we are. --Peter Meehan, editor, Lucky Peach <br> A refreshing, fun, and yummy feast of food stories! I find myself too often steeped in the 'oughts' of food behavior and not in the food memories that enrich our lives; this collection broadened my horizons. --Jered Lawson, Executive Director, Pie Ranch <br> These thoughtful, wide-ranging essays reveal our relationship to food--at once primal and intimately idiosyncratic--as inextricable from our appetite for connection: to our pasts, to our futures, to what we hope for and what we've lost. --Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk, A Memoir <br> A fantastic collection that is as much about relationships as it is about the food that bonds us. You will never look at your family dinner in the same way again. --Wyl