Poor Mans Feast, Elissa Altman
Poor Mans Feast, Elissa Altman
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
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Poor Man's Feast
A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking

Author: Elissa Altman

Narrator: Elissa Altman

Unabridged: 8 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/27/2023

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

From James Beard Award–winning writer Elissa Altman comes a story that marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion. Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan—a small-town Connecticut Yankee with parsimonious tendencies and a devotion to simple living—it would change Elissa’s relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever. With tender and often hilarious honesty (and twenty-seven delicious recipes), Poor Man’s Feast is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.

About Elissa Altman

Elissa Altman is the critically acclaimed author of Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, and the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name. Her work has appeared everywhere from the Wall Street Journal and the London Guardian to the New York Times, Tin House, LitHub, Saveur, O: The Oprah Magazine, and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year. Her work has been anthologized for six years in Best Food Writing. A finalist for the 2016 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize,she has appeared live everywhere from the TEDx stage to the Joseph Papp Public Theater, on Heritage Radio, and NPR’s The Splendid Table and All Things Considered.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Minako on January 23, 2015

Elissa Altman has been compared with M.F.K. Fisher. I don't get it. Her writing does not possess the elegance or the class that Fisher's prose does. Altman's voice is condescending, her style stiff, her narrative often angry. I liked the recurring theme of the love between her and her father, which......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on February 06, 2014

I really love memoirs that center around food but this one never quite caught me. The stories were fine but maybe it's because I'm not from the East Coast, or rich, or a New Yorker, or a Jew, but I didn't get many/most of her name dropping references, except to know that I was supposed to be impress......more

Goodreads review by Mari on January 31, 2019

I’m a sucker for books that have “culinary themes” and enjoy them even more when there is a well written story with well developed characters. I felt like I entered right into the lives of Elissa and Susan...from two very different backgrounds, but very much in love with each other and with all thin......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on April 02, 2024

Great read and insight into how food shapes us whether planting, buying, cooking, or eating. It is also the story of leaving Manhattan, a known place and life, to a small town in Connecticut to start a new life with Susan. Bonus; there are recipes. Enjoy.......more

Goodreads review by Bookish on June 18, 2016

I’m a big lover of food, finding great joy just puttering in my kitchen with a pot roast in my slow cooker and making and baking a couple dozen of my buttermilk cheesy biscuits. I’m also a big lover of memoirs of all kinds, thoroughly enjoying the stories of people from all walks of life with interes......more

Quotes

“Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious, this is one of the finest food memoirs of recent years.” New York Times Book Review

“Luminous writing brings many stories small and large to feed the heart.” Publishers Weekly

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