Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen, with Recipes

Pass the Polenta offers up kitchen secrets, tricks of the trade, and lessons in life learned at the stoves of the many seasoned cooks in Lust's world: an Italian immigrant grandmother who plucked chickens in the backyard; an introverted mushroom-forager who accompanied her to the woods to collect chanterelles; a German auntie who learned to knead bread dough in a wooden bucket. These mentors are ordinary folk, all of them, going about their daily business of baking bread and pouring hearty wine. Their stories eloquently demonstrate that cooking is an expression of art and of love, of family and self, of soil and the seasons.