Curious, creative, fearless Cortney Burns, formerly of Bar Tartine, is back with a personal and timely cookbook project about nostalgia, immigration, and her own uniquely delicious recipes. Since closing Bar Tartine years ago, she was recruited to help build a high-end ecological resort. Eager for a radical change, she moved to North Adams, Massachusetts - uprooting to reroot, as she puts it - a move that brought out her intellectual curiosity and need to ground herself in a new place to find a new culinary muse.

The result is a cookbook like no other, featuring Cortney’s seasonal, elemental cooking style but enriched by storytelling through food. Here are 110 recipes in 6 chapters that pay homage to the seasons and the elements of water, fire, air, and ether. Recipes range from mains to drinks and desserts to condiments, such as sauces and pickled fruits.

As in Bar Tartine, the pantry of preserved foods forms the backbone of this cookbook, adding all the physical and mental health benefits of fermented foods and streamlining cooking. The focus here is on healthy, vegetable-forward recipes, emphasising techniques for turning proteins into side dishes or seasonings rather than the main event. Cortney found inspiration for these recipes by peeling back the layers of the region to glimpse its history, immigration patterns, and agriculture. In this vein, this book teaches readers how to convert their own experiences and sense of place into kitchen inspiration and development of a personal cooking style. This is an award-garnering, intelligent, and unique cookbook from a tastemaker whose platform is growing.