Homage: Recipes and Stories from an Amish Soul Food Kitchen

For a limited time we have bookplates signed by Chris Scott.

Chris Scott's great-grandfather was himself the grandson of enslaved people. He left Virginia, where his family had lived for generations, and settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. There his descendants, Chris Scott among them, grew up eating not only the food they had brought north with them, but the chicken corn soup, potato dumplings, pot pies, and other Amish specialties of their neighbors who had thickly settled the area.

The Amish soul food in Homage is very much the results of Scott's own creative insight. Though it is inspired by and draws on his immediate family's own cooking, it is also informed by his own long career as a culinary professional. And whatever you might think you know about either cuisine separately, in Scott's hands something new emerges.

Take for example his rhubarb chow-chow, or his green tomato confit. His "city mouse" scrapple is thickened with buckwheat instead of cornmeal, and he makes a boiled peanut hummus enriched with ham hocks. His neckbone dumplings speak to a resourcefulness in both traditions, and red velvet cornmeal madeleines demonstrate that the wider world is also a source for inspiration.

Insightful and inspiring for anyone interested in the manifold ways American culinary history continues to evolved.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.