Through stories of hand-rolled pasta and homemade chutney, local markets and backyard gardens, and wild mushrooms and foraged grape leaves--this book recounts in loving detail the memories, recipes, and culinary traditions of people who have come to the United States from around the world. Chef and teacher Lynne Anderson has gone into immigrant kitchens and discovered the power of food to recall a lost world for those who have left much behind. The enticing, easy-to-prepare recipes feature specialties like Greek dolmades, Filipino adobo, Brazilian peixada, and Sudanese mulukhiyah. Together with Robin Radin's beautiful photographs, these stories and recipes will inspire cooks of all levels to explore new traditions while perhaps rediscovering their own culinary roots.
Lynne Christy Anderson (www.lynnechristyanderson.com) is a writer, teacher, and cook who lives in Boston. For many years she worked professionally in award-winning restaurants until she turned to a career in teaching, first working with immigrant adults learning English as a Second Language. Her students--mothers and fathers from places like Guatemala, Pakistan, Vietnam and Morocco, grandparents from Haiti, Cape Verde, Brazil, and China--shared the triumph and loss that marked their coming to America and the way that food lessened the struggle by serving as a link to the past and a bridge into the future. These stories led Lynne to first consider the powerful relationship between food and cultural well-being.
Her first book, "Breaking Bread: Stories and Recipes from Immigrant Kitchens" explores these connections through interviews, recipes, and photographs by award-winning photographer, Robin Radin. Alice Waters praised the book and said, "Lynne Anderson's portraits of recent immigrant families capture a crucial truth about how real food connects us to our culture, our memories, and to one another. This is an important book."
Lynne was the recipient of a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Foundation scholarship in non-fiction in 2008 and teaches English Language Learners at Boston College and Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts. She has also designed and taught classes exploring culture through cooking with school-aged children in public school and after school programs in New England where students traveled to ethnic markets, farms, grist mills, and Native American Indian reservations to learn about the ways people with different cultural backgrounds cook and eat.
