At Home on the Range

Recently, while moving into a new house, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mothers attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardcovers was a book called At Home on the Range or, How To Make Friends with Your Stove by Gilberts great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. Having only been peripherally aware of the volume, Gilbert dug in with some curiosity, and soon found that she had stumbled upon a book far ahead of its time. In her workaday cookbook, Potter espoused the importance of farmers markets and ethnic food Italian, Jewish, and German, derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated a devotion to seeking out new epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and during World War II she cajoles local poultry farmers into saving buckets of coxcombs for her so she can try to cook them in the French manner.