To Eat: A Country Life

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.