Here is 20 years of wandering, bumping around, trying and failing, chipping away and sometimes getting somewhere carefully twisted into sentences on pages and bundled together. We can call this a “Ferment Pittsburgh Handbook” of sorts, but it’s not called that, nor is it that. It’s a lot of different things in one. This is my version of what I want a cookbook to be. It’s 74 decentralized sections, organized by season specific to Western Pennsylvania’s ecosystem and climate, spanning 300+ pages of mostly how-to descriptions, some thoughts, and a few rambles and perspectives all funneling together into the great big flow of what a recipe is.

Summarily, this is a book on “how to make a recipe.” Not how to make something, but rather how to make all the individual parts so your larder and storerooms, etc are ready to tell you what to make, how to make it, and what the recipe is. That’s what it is and also not what it is because you won’t find an A to B to C take on that either. This is about growing the wheat, churning the butter, making the sugar, and processing the fruit to get to a pie. This is about the winding chase of making something rooted in nature that’s expressive of the fleeting natural moment and your collaboration with it, rather than making food that describes the human ability to control nature. There are other stories and tidbits too, most of them pondering putting back together this on-demand unnatural life we’ve made. (For a more concise well-packaged description you can also read the back of the book in the image below.)

You’re formally invited to have a copy of this book for yourself. This is the book a younger version of myself dreamed of having. Even if you don’t want it you can still buy it in hopes that one day someone stumbles on it in a thrift store and it bursts a world open to them that they were searching for. Just like it would have been for a younger me who started looking for this book out in the woods way back when.

Justin