Food Is a Feeling

An intimate, story-driven cookbook about the therapeutic and restorative powers of food, featuring 75 recipes for comforting, happy-making meals from the James Beard Award–winning author of Where Cooking Begins and That Sounds So Good

Carla Lalli’s beloved, free-wheeling style of food has always drawn from her experiences cooking and eating with her family. But, after her divorce, she discovered how eating your feelings can be a good thing. In Food Is a Feeling, she uses her signature humor to dig deeper into her favorite recipes like Coconut Chipotle Chicken, Many Allium Pasta, and Burnt Caramel Rhubarb Compote alongside tales of how cooking has been a comfort and salve in her challenging times.

While she first self-soothed with soft pretzels dragged through herbed butter and one-portion pots of beans and greens, she became flooded with memories of all the ways cooking has served as a scaffold for her entire life—through her childhood growing up in an Italian family, to her years as a restaurant cook, and as a parent and food writer. With poignancy and hilarity, she marvels at how painful life phases still manage to inspire beautiful and delicious things to eat and comes to see how this transition shapes how she sees cooking now with more simplicity, more generosity, more pleasure. 

Carla has always believed that what matters most in the kitchen is how a recipe works for you and how it can lead you to cook with abandon. Food Is a Feeling is a celebratory (and delicious) reminder that the joy of cooking for oneself is as powerful as sharing food with others.