America’s best-known chefs—in a stellar gathering—recall the dishes that warm their hearts in a collection benefiting one of the nation’s leading antihunger organizations.
Cooking from the Heart features one hundred of the country’s most beloved and well-known chefs, who each contribute not only a superb dish—whether a holiday tradition, comfort food, cross-cultural innovation, or family classic—but also the story of why that dish means the world to them. The chefs speak as parents, children, partners, neighbors, husbands, wives, and friends. Cooking from the Heart is a joyous collection of recipes in which love is always the first ingredient. Here are Ming Tsai and his family wrapping potstickers on the Ping-Pong table in his grandmother’s house; Gale Gand and her son making pie crusts with a rolling pin that’s been in their family for five generations; Seth Bixby Daugherty improvising a mulberry crisp on a cross-country peace march; Marcel Desaulnier recounting the Christmas his mother sent him her chocolates and cookies while he was serving in Vietnam; and Lidia Bastianich crushing herbs under her infant grandchildren’s noses to awaken their senses to rich aromas. From Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s grandmother’s Alsatian Lamb Stew to Rick Bayless’s hometown Orchard Peach Cobbler, from Sara Moulton's Grilled Fish discovered on a magical trip to Greece to Emeril Lagasse’s favorite Bolognese Sauce for Sundays with friends, Cooking from the Heart presents an inexhaustible range of recipes you’ll want to make your own. These are stories to cherish; they will remind you of—and even inspire—your own family’s mealtimes and traditions.
MICHAEL J. ROSEN is the author or editor of some fifty books for adults and children, several of which have benefited Share Our Strength, on whose Board of Directors he has served for a dozen years. His other books include poetry, picture books, the humor biennial Mirth of a Nation, and the cookbook Midnight Snacks. He lives in central Ohio.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit SHARE OUR STRENGTH, one of the nation’s preeminent antihunger agencies. Its programs include Taste of the Nation® and the Great American Bake Sale®, a nationwide fund-raising event that targets childhood hunger. Since 1984, Share Our Strength has distributed more than $68 million to fight hunger worldwide. For more information, visit www.strength.org.
RICHARD RUSSO, who contributed the Foreword, is the best-selling author of Empire Falls, The Whore’s Child, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and other fiction.
