Author(s): Lynn Z. Bloom; Christopher Schaberg (Series edited by); Ian Bogost (Series edited by)

Essay | Food & Drink | Food writing & reference

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

 Lynn Bloom's Recipe celebrates the complications and contradictions, the serious and play, the bounty and scarcity, represented by the simple instructions that put food on the table. This book, like the object itself, 'exists as much in the imagination' as on the plate, a satisfying examination of the marvelous 'process and promise' of the humble recipe. * Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life *

Contents: Introduction: The Secret Life of Recipes 1. "First, Turn and Face the Stove." The Recipe as an Instruction Guide 2. "You say toma-to, I say tomahto": The Recipe as Conversation 3. A Taste of Home: The Recipe for Comfort Cooking in Tough Times 4. Joys of Cooking-and Eating: The Great American Thanksgiving Celebration Recipe 5. "Please, sir, I want some more." The Recipe as a Manifestation of Power, Politics Poverty, and Punishment 6. Play With Your Food, the Recipe as Jazz Lagniappe: The Best Blueberry Pie Index

Author Biography: Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing Emerita at the University of Connecticut, USA, where she taught rhetoric and composition studies research, autobiography, creative nonfiction, and women writers courses 1988-2015. She has written more than 25 books, including Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times ( 2008) and The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays (2008). She has served as President of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1988-90 and chaired the Division of Teaching Writing and the Division of Prose Writing of the Modern Language Association.

Promotional Information: Provides a succulent, soup-to-dessert analysis of the lessons embedded in recipes-lessons that extend well beyond the obvious instructions on how to prepare the actual food to more subtle guidelines for nourishing body, spirit, and self-identity; family and friendships; tradition and innovation; culture, creativity, commerce and competition.