Bless This Food : Four Seasons of Menus, Recipes, and Table Graces

Bless This Food is a unique cookbook that combines wonderful menus and recipes with table prayers, food customs, and religious and cultural traditions. The menus are for a wide variety of occasions—traditional national holidays, family gatherings, religious celebrations, ethnic festivals, life passages, and get-togethers with friends.

Organized by seasons, Bless This Food is eclectic in its choice of cuisines—from French, Italian, English, American, Jewish, and Irish to Native American, African American, and Hispanic. The occasions celebrated are also eclectic and culturally diverse, celebrating the many traditions from which America’s citizens have originated. The main religious celebrations of the Christian and Jewish traditions are included. The authors’ own interests are reflected in their choices of such occasions as Sir Winston Churchill’s Birthday Breakfast, Claude Monet’s Birthday, A Jane Austen Holiday Lunch with Friends, Robert Burns Night, and Blessings in Deed, in which a meal is prepared for another person or family.

Beautifully and elegantly designed, and illustrated with sketches by Tonya Young, Bless This Food acknowledges the sacred nature of the everyday pleasures of food and table.

Julia M. Pitkin, Editor-in-Chief of Cumberland House Hearthside Books, is the editor and creator of more than twenty cookbooks, including "Specialties of the House," a comprehensive country inn and bed and breakfast cookbook. She lives in Nashville.

Karen B. Grant, educated in Antwerp and at the University of Houston, is active in women's ministries in the Presbyterian Church of America. She lives in Middle Tennessee.

George Grant is director of King's Meadow Study Center, editorial director of Highland Books, and author of more than three dozen books in the areas of history, theology, and the arts.