A memorable book about the path food travels from garden to table
A celebration of life together, a tribute to an utterly unique garden, a wonderfully idiosyncratic guide for cooks and gardeners interested in exploring the possibilities of farm-to-table living-To Eat is all of these things and more.
In 1974, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd moved from Boston to southern Vermont, where they became the proprietors of a twenty-eight-acre patch of wilderness. The land was forested, overgrown, and wild, complete with a stream. Today, North Hill's seven carefully cultivated acres-open to visitors during the warmer months-are an internationally renowned garden.
In the intervening years, both the garden and the gardening books (A Year at North Hill, Living Seasonally, Our Life in Gardens) Eck and Winterrowd created together have been acclaimed in many forms, including in the pages of The New York Times. They were at work on To Eat-which also includes recipes from the renowned chef and restaurateur Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta and beautiful illustrations from their long-time collaborator Bobbi Angell-when Winterrowd passed away, in 2010.
Informative, funny, and moving, the delights within-a runaway bull; a recipe for crisp, fatty chicarrones; a personal history of the Egyptian onion; a hymn to the magic of lettuce-are sure to make To Eat a book readers return to again and again.
"The vegetable garden at North Hill always enchants me, and therefore it is a particular pleasure to read of its bounty in this last collaboration between Joe and Wayne."
Page Dickey, author of Embroidered Ground
"To Eat: A Country Life, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's last book together (Winterrowd died in 2010), is an artful tribute to their 7-acre southern Vermont garden and their passion for raising, preparing and eating food together. Even lettuce becomes luxuriant in their exuberant and informative hands. Bobbi Angell's drawings and Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta's recipes, along with Eck and Winterrowd's elegant prose, take readers through the northern New England seasons, featuring one food per chapter. The book is seasoned with history, anecdotes and abundant practical advice, and with reverence for land and tradition: 'the deepest reward of a country life is that its deliberate embrace of a small conserving ethic opens one to the rhythms, values, habits and flavors of another time.' Whether or not you garden, To Eat is a vicarious pleasure."
Deb Baker, The Concord Monitor
"Part memoir, part cookbook, part gardening book, To Eat: A Country Life is a delight. Fans of the authors' previous books, among them A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden and Our Life in Gardens, will find similar rewards in the latest offering in which educated musings on country life and growing tips are delivered in prose more akin to poetry and literature . . . They, and their writing, are to gardening what M.F.K. Fisher was to food: a revelation . . . The book brings both laughter and tears. The afterword is particularly solemn. Wayne Winterrowd died in 2010 in the middle of writing the book, and it will be the last joint effort by the pair. Loss, in life and in the garden, is a bitter truth."
