Based on the James Beard Award-Winning Blog
Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and a food-fanatical father, Elissa learned early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining at fine establishments, from Le Pavillon to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical. She served rare game birds at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that the guests couldn’t turn around and bought eight timbale molds while working at Dean & DeLuca, just to make her food tall.
Then, Elissa met and fell in love with Susan—a frugal, small-town Connecticut Yankee with a devotion to simple living—and it changed her relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever.
Told with tender and often hilarious honesty, and filled with twenty-six delicious recipes, Poor Man’s Feast is a tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, demonstrating how all our stories are inextricably bound up with how we feed ourselves and those we love.
“A brave, generous story about family, food, and finding the way home.”—Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life
“A wild ride with biting highs, withering lows, and tremendous wit and humor...A beautiful story.”—Deborah Madison, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
“Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious, this is one of the finest food memoirs of recent years.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Delightful . . . A wealth of food tales about foodies and food phobics, cooks and kitchen disasters, cooking successes and failures—all in clear, pleasing prose . . . Poor Man’s Feast deserves a place on the shelf with the finest food writers.”—New York Journal of Books
“[Altman] artfully merges relationship narrative, personal history, and food memoir in this satisfying book. . . . Luminous writing brings many stories small and large to feed the heart.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Told] with her delicious trademark blend of humor, love, and dedication to simplicity in life and, of course, in food.”—Portland Monthly
