INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick * A Country Living Best Book of Fall * A Washington Post Best Feel-Good Book of the Year * One of the New York Times's Best Historical Fiction Novels of Fall In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor’s A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world. Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever. England, 1835. London is awash with thrilling new ingredients, from rare spices to exotic fruits. But no one knows how to use them. When Eliza Acton is told by her publisher to write a cookery book instead of the poetry she loves, she refuses—until her bankrupt father is forced to flee the country. As a woman, Eliza has few options. Although she’s never set foot in a kitchen, she begins collecting recipes and teaching herself to cook. Much to her surprise she discovers a talent – and a passion – for the culinary arts. Eliza hires young, destitute Ann Kirby to assist her. As they cook together, Ann learns about poetry, love and ambition. The two develop a radical friendship, breaking the boundaries of class while creating new ways of writing recipes. But when Ann discovers a secret in Eliza’s past, and finds a voice of her own, their friendship starts to fray. Based on the true story of the first modern cookery writer, Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is a spellbinding novel about female friendship, the struggle for independence, and the transcendent pleasures and solace of food.

In this follow-up to her spectacular bestselling debut Cook Like a Rock Star, Food Network chef and host Anne Burrell shows you not just how to keep rocking in the kitchen, but how to cook like you own it with 100 recipes to get you comfortable with dozens of essential techniques. Taking control in the kitchen means mastering flavors and constantly keeping an eye on what Anne calls "QC" (quality control). It starts with learning the power of great ingredients (how quality olive oil and salt can transform an everyday dish), understanding the tools in your kitchen, and getting your mise en place ready before diving into a recipe. Anne shows you how to apply these skills to a slew of delicious, high-brow/low-stress recipes that get you out of a cooking rut, so you can keep surprising yourself in the kitchen. POC (piece of cake)! Try out your new skills with classic bistro fare, such as Grilled Hanger Steak, Fish and Chips, or simple dishes, like Mushroom Soup with Bacon, and Shrimp in Garlic Oil and Chiles. Master roasting with a Hawaiian pork dish, have fun with spices making chicken roti, for a casual bite there’s her Sicilian Tuna, Caponata, Provolone & Arugula Panino. Each dish—whether firsts, seconds, sides, brunch, sandwiches or desserts—is accessible yet teaches a range of techniques and embraces tantalizing flavors. And they all share Anne’s secrets to great home cooking. Here is Anne at her most personal—complete with her enthusiastic, sassy approach to how to get the most out of ingredients and whip up irresistibly delicious dishes that she likes to cook at home. So cook these recipes, master them, and then you will OWN YOUR KITCHEN!

Tracing the emergence of the domestic kitchen from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century, Sara Pennell explores how the English kitchen became a space of specialised activity, sociability and strife. Drawing upon texts, images, surviving structures and objects, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 opens up the early modern English kitchen as an important historical site in the construction of domestic relations between husband and wife, masters, mistresses and servants and householders and outsiders; and as a crucial resource in contemporary heritage landscapes.

Ask children where food comes from, and they’ll probably answer: “the supermarket.” Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day? Ann Vileisis’s answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. Kitchen Literacy takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today’s sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer’s markets that are now enjoying a resurgence. Vileisis chronicles profound changes in how American cooks have considered their foods over two centuries and delivers a powerful statement: what we don’t know could hurt us. As the distance between farm and table grew, we went from knowing particular places and specific stories behind our foods’ origins to instead relying on advertisers’ claims. The woman who raised, plucked, and cooked her own chicken knew its entire life history while today most of us have no idea whether hormones were fed to our poultry. Industrialized eating is undeniably convenient, but it has also created health and environmental problems, including food-borne pathogens, toxic pesticides, and pollution from factory farms. Though the hidden costs of modern meals can be high, Vileisis shows that greater understanding can lead consumers to healthier and more sustainable choices. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat.