When Michelle meets Rich like her, a closet writer with a fierce love of good books and good food their single-mindedness at the table draws them together, and meals become a stage for their long courtship. Finally engaged, they move in together, but sitting down to dinner each night while working at careers, trying to write, and falling into the routines that come to define a home soon feels like something far different.
The Gastronomy of Marriage is a book about two lives coming together at the dinner table. It's a story of lasagna, fried rice, and Mexican stew, both the successful meals and the terribly less so. It's about having nothing to eat when the cupboard is bare and nothing to eat when it's full. About sharing a meal each night with a man who was raised in another household and so has different traditions and approaches to eating, different comfort foods, small allergies and dislikes, a body with a superior metabolism and a stunning catalogue of digestive maladies and who, if all goes according to plan, will be the person Michelle shares her dinners with always.
As they save and plan for a wedding, the nightly compromises, small generosities, and stubborn stakings of ground that take place around the dinner table offer a context in which Michelle considers what shes learned from the marriages around her, and what she and Rich might create for themselves.
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