At Mesa's Edge: Cooking and Ranching in Colorado's North Fork Valley [Hardcover]

Eugenia Bone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2004

Eugenia Bone was perfectly happy with her life as a New York City food writer, but she knew that her husband, a transplanted westerner, was filled with a discontent he couldn't explain. So when he returned from a fishing trip in the Rockies one day and announced that he wanted to buy a forty-five-acre ranch in Crawford, Colorado (population 255), she reluctantly said yes. Then she loaded imported pasta, artichokes in oil, and cured Italian salami into her duffle bag and headed west with her two young children.
At Mesa's Edge is the witty, often moving story of ranch restoration and of struggles with defiant skunks, barbed wire, marauding cows, and loneliness. Eugenia learns to garden in the drought, to fly-fish, and to forage. In the process, she discovers the bounty of the region. She fries zucchini flowers in batter and dips them in cilantro-flavored mayonnaise, grills flavorful T-bones from the local ranchers' grass-fed beef, pan-fries trout, fills crepes with wild mushrooms, and makes cherry pies with thick, sugary crusts. Gradually, she begins to adjust to the rhythms of the land.
Partly a memoir, partly a cookbook with 150 appealing recipes, At Mesa's Edge is a transporting tale of rejuvenation, a celebration of everything local, and a reminder that the best food is to be found in our own back yards.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this engaging tale of modern-day homesteading, New York food writer Bone follows her husband's dream to Crawford, Colo., where they purchase and fix up a 45-acre ranch complete with 1880s cabin. There, she makes his Western dream her own. Bone chronicles her summer of culinary pioneering in a warm, chatty voice, always with a sense of humor about herself. With graceful prose, she details her gourmet adventures. She braves bee stings to pick zucchini flowers, then fries her harvest in beer batter, with a cilantro mayonnaise for dipping. She acquires a 20-gauge shotgun, hunts pheasants and bakes them with cream, horseradish and brandy. With elk she buys from a local rancher, she makes elk tenderloin with wild porcinis. Bone goes mushrooming, grows too many zucchinis and peppers and buys illegal unpasteurized goat cheese. By summer's end, she no longer yearns for multiplexes and lunch dates, has mastered the "cool wave" from the steering wheel and has learned to live in the moment. A wild food advocate and critic of industrialized agriculture, Bone exhorts readers to eat seasonally, suggesting 103 summer Italian- and Mexican-inspired recipes. From Zucchini Flowers Stuffed with Smoked Trout to Chukar (a wild partridge) with Figs, the recipes rely on local ingredients Bone has in abundance. Though she does suggest alternative ingredients, some recipes feel too aspirational for even ambitious city or suburban dwellers. Others, like the Vegetable and Ricotta Terrine and the "sweet and piquant" Lamb Stew should tempt any cook with a good butcher or greengrocer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

EUGENIA BONE writes for many national magazines and newspapers, including Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, and the New York Times. Her Web site, etable.net, is devoted to seasonal culinary arts.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (June 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618221263
• ISBN-13: 978-0618221264
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,158,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have been writing about food for twenty years. My first book, At Mesa's Edge, was nominated for a Colorado Book Award. My second book, Italian Family Dining, was written with my father, artist and cookbook author Edward Giobbi. My third, Well Preserved, was nominated for a James Beard Award. But now, with Mycophilia, I'm writing about science. That might seem incongruous, but in fact, recipe writing and science writing are not totally dissimilar: both require very precise thinking and evocative language. It took me years to understand the science (I was not a biology major, not by a long shot) and to navigate the erudite and eccentric community of professional and amateur mycologists, but producing Mycophilia has been the most profound writing experience of my career. Mushrooms turned out to be the window by which I came to understand nature in a deeper way.

For mushroom recipes, links to mushroom clubs, and more, go to http://mycophilia.com/

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bounty and Beauty of Western Colorado August 29, 2004

By Lucky17

Format:Hardcover

At Mesa's Edge is a wonderful book for people who love the West and who also love cooking and good food. The Author describes the land and the residents beautifully and respectfully. She has a clear understanding of the region...from water rights to wildlife to the quality of the harvest to cattle ranching. There is nothing pretentious or self-serving in the author's description of her many "adjustments" to life on a Colorado ranch. Her description of restoring the run-down property are both amusing and amazing. The book is a fun and informative read.

I grew up on the Western Slope of Colorado, know the area well, still visit family there, and remember with great nostaligia the bounty that the wondrous land produces. I highly recommend At Mesa's Edge. I am looking forward to preparing the many interesting recipes.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As refreshing and soul-stirring as a Rocky Mountain breeze July 24, 2004

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

After taking my wife and 18-month-old baby for a long month to sweltering France last summer, I resolved to do better by them this year. And so, before the first snow had fallen, we drove out to the posh resort town of Southampton, New York, to rent a modest cottage with the promise of an ocean breeze. Right off, we found a simple little house with a bonus: a rear deck designed by an extremely tasteful architect named Kevin Bone.

It turns out that, several decades ago, I had met --- and not repulsed --- the architect's wife. After we struck a real estate deal, we struck up an e-mail friendship. Only then did I learn that she would be publishing her first book. So I had the odd experience of reading Eugenia Bone's AT MESA'S EDGE: Cooking and Ranching in Colorado's North Fork Valley, in the house that she and her family abandons each summer. Confession: The Bone ranch sounds so beautiful and Eugenia's recipes are so enticing that, Hamptons be damned, I'd rather be on her porch in Colorado.

Eugenia Bone may be the Peter Mayle of the American West, but she sure didn't start out with much enthusiasm for Colorado. Her husband came home from a fishing trip and said he'd found a 45-acre ranch. She understood why: "There was an empty place in him that was not being filled." And so she signed the mortgage papers "the same way I would sign a release for Kevin to have necessary surgery; it had to be done."

Of course the place was a wreck. And Eugenia, a New York City-based food writer, was not a great candidate for assimilation. But as she comes to learn, the hard work of restoring the ranch is balanced by simple pleasures not available in Manhattan. The postmaster divides her mail into two piles: "important" and "not." The sign in front of a church reads: IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A SIGN FROM GOD, THIS IS IT. The woman at the gas station gives her credit: "I trust you." She cooks fish caught earlier that day. She discovers that no meat is more tender than elk.

And, slowly, she learns, mostly about the relationship of water and land. She loves to cook; she comes to realize that the land too needs to be fed. That moment of revelation seals her love of this place. And she comes to see that living in the moment --- really, the only way to live in a place so dominated by Nature --- is magical. "Time passes slower; life seems to last longer, and death, because it is daily observable in nature, is not quite as frightening."

It's a delicious life, and she shares it not only in her quiet, concise prose, but in the generous chunk of the book where she serves up recipes. Some of the dishes require ingredients not available in city markets, but anyone can master her Cold Zucchini Soup enlivened with chile powder and tortilla strips and an intensely flavored (thyme, rosemary, sage, lemon zest) Lamb Stew.

Armchair travelers, dreamers and weekend cooks should find AT MESA'S EDGE as refreshing and soul-stirring as a Rocky Mountain breeze.

--- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great food, great life lessons December 6, 2004

By L. Cumberland

Format:Hardcover

I love this book. Lately I've become intrigued by all kinds of regional American cooking, which is what drew me to this book in the first place. But what I found in these pages was so much more effecting and profound...

The first section, the memoir, reads like a sort of fish-out-of-water coming-of-age tale about the author's reluctant (at first) immersion into this part of the world, and her gradual embrace of it. I found it sometimes haunting, sometimes hilarious, and always very engrossing. And tender -- yes, there's some fun poked at the locals, but it's usually the locals themselves wielding the stick as far as I could tell, and no one gets poked more often than the author. She's the one who is transformed by these encounters; she's the one who "comes of age".

Then there are the recipes, which seem to have been either informed or inspired or enhanced by the experiences described in the first section, which is a great way to approach a recipe in general, I think -- as a sort of companion piece to one life experience or another. Like listening to the soundtrack CD of a movie you loved. You definitely get the feeling these recipes could stand on their own -- they make that intuitive kind of sense on the page, and the ones that I have tried so far have been pretty sublime. But reading the memoir just made them that much tastier.

Taken as a whole, the book is really about how a love of food, and the pursuit of good, real food, offers a doorway into all kinds of magical places that would otherwise remain shut tight. We've all heard that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. This book seems to say that the way to the heart and soul of a community is through its food -- its produce, its livestock, and all of the one-of-a-kind characters who bring those things to life, literally. It made me want to get to know all the people who grow or gather things in my own community. I bet I'll look at where I live differently after that. Probably look at myself differently, too.

Beautiful book.