Slow Books: FALL Recommendations

The Slow Books curators have hand-picked recommended readings to add to your spring reading list! Below you’ll find a list of books that pair well with the issues that we’re talking about and celebrating each month at Slow Food. 

Click the book covers below to go to find them on the Slow Food USA Bookshop page. Bookshop.org sources from local independently owned bookstores to secure your title, and by purchasing through the Slow Food USA affiliate page, you are also supporting our organization at the same time (everybody wins)!

September

National Organic Harvest Month

Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
by David M Masumoto

Written in 1995, there are most certainly some dated details in here, but overall the feel of this book is timeless and lovely. It starts out in the spring season and proceeds through a year of life on the  farm, told through short, beautifully written essays. Masumoto writes of his transition to organic peach farming (though he also grows grapes) and the Sun Crest peach he is attempting to save from a type of extinction. He writes of his farm looking messy because he is not “sterilizing” it each year and is also growing wildflowers at his wife’s request. He has taken the farm over from his parents, who bought it after being released from a Japanese internment camp. Warning: you may develop a dangerous craving for fresh-off-the-tree, organically-grown peaches!

Recommended by Tammy Maitland.

October

Coconuts and Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South
by Von Diaz

Let’s talk about home. Hot food in the kitchen. Vibrant colors. Familiar ingredients that all seem to get along. Von Diaz bridges two worlds, her birthplace of Puerto Rico and the Atlanta she grew up in. While her recipes are sensational, they are also friendly and down-to-earth. Coconuts and Collards is a memoir told through taste and smell as much as through photos and prose. It’s a cookbook that makes Puerto Rico and the South feel like home, wherever you’re from.

Recommended by Cedar Schimke.

November

Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution
by Roxana Jullapat

As the head baker and owner of a beloved Los Angeles bakery, Roxana Jullapat knows the difference local, sustainable flour can make: brown rice flour lightens up a cake, rustic rye adds unexpected chewiness to a bagel, and ground toasted oats enrich doughnuts. Her bakery, Friends & Family, works with dedicated farmers and millers around the country to source and incorporate the eight mother grains in every sweet, bread, or salad on the menu. In her debut cookbook, Roxana shares her greatest hits, over 90 recipes for reinventing your favorite cakes, cookies, pies, breads, and more.

Recommended by Margaret Woodruff.