Gloss Cookbook Shelf: Morning Glory Farm

If you can’t hop on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend (I’m not talking to you, Massachusetts) I’m going to introduce you to the next best thing. Morning Glory Farms and the Family that Feeds an Island by Tom Dunlop is a collection of 70 family recipes brought to you straight from the heart of Morning Glory, a family farm in Edgartown founded 1979.

There is a great benefit to utilitarian cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking that offer recipes and technique without much ado. There is also a place in the world for cookbooks that tell stories. When you finish a good piece of fiction, you feel like the characters are so real that you half expect to run into them next time you’re out (or you wish that you would).

When you finish a good cookbook, that isn’t always the case. The characters in cookbooks, thyme, garlic, beets and corn, don’t have families, love lives and homes, but they do have history. Most food, real food, can be traced back to roots on farms, where in many cases, they were lovingly cultivated by dedicated famers.

This book gives you both – simple, straightforward recipes with ingredients that you will recognize (if you don’t already have in your kitchen) and the history of a second- and third-generation farming family. Follow along as they create Simple Chicken Pot Pie, Curried Asparagus Soup and family versions of classics like corn pudding and zucchini casserole.

Not only will you feel like you’ve been there, you’ll want to head out to your own farmer’s market so that you can get cooking.