From James Beard Award–winning writer Elissa Altman comes a story that marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion.

Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.

But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan—a small-town Connecticut Yankee with parsimonious tendencies and a devotion to simple living—it would change Elissa’s relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever. With tender and often hilarious honesty (and twenty-seven delicious recipes), Poor Man’s Feast is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.