The Comfort Food Diaries

My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart

Emily Nunn

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781451674224
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451674279
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A former New Yorker editor chronicles her journey to heal old wounds and find comfort in the face of loss through travel, friends and family, and home-cooked meals in this memoir “full of warm, bracing honesty…humor and paradox…and sprinkled liberally with the type of recipes that will make book club members say, ‘I could make that!’” (Booklist, starred review).

One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother’s sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security.

After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily—an avid cook and professional food writer—poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she’d made a terrible mistake—only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.

Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with relatives and friends. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic family comes to life in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future.

In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit, in the sour tang of Great-Grandmother’s Mean Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food—and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. “The Comfort Food Diaries is nothing less than a tour de force by Emily Nunn, our most hilarious and touching food writer. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry...and you’ll get hungry” (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Chapter One: Cherries Jubilee and Other Dangerous Dishes
• Chapter Two: Ezra Pound Cake
• Chapter Three: The Grapefruit Diet for Non-Dieters
• Chapter Four: Finding the Comfort in Comfort Food
• Chapter Five: The Peanut, Pickle, Country Ham Cure
• Chapter Six: Great-Grandmother’s Mean Lemon Cake
• Chapter Seven: The Idea of a Family
• Chapter Eight: Belly of the Beast
• Chapter Nine: Deliverance
• Chapter Ten: Ringing Belles
• Chapter Eleven: Wyler
• Chapter Twelve: Dot
• Chapter Thirteen: The Stuffed Pantry
• Chapter Fourteen: If Once You Have Slept on an Island
• Chapter Fifteen: Bring out Your Dead
• Chapter Sixteen: City of Mixed Emotions
• Chapter Seventeen: Hot Wheels and Pinto Beans
• Chapter Eighteen: In Search of New Recipes
• Acknowledgments
• Recipes
• About the Author
• Copyright