Provides a succulent, soup-to-dessert analysis of the lessons embedded in recipes—lessons that extend well beyond the obvious instructions on how to prepare the actual food to more subtle guidelines for nourishing body, spirit, and self-identity; family and friendships; tradition and innovation; culture, creativity, commerce and competition.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook’s fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one’s worldview, if not waistline. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

"Fascinating. . . . [Bloom] explains how recipes unite us, contain lessons about hospitality, and can be a signature as individual as fingerprints." - Globe and Mail

"Lynn Bloom’s Recipe celebrates the complications and contradictions, the serious and play, the bounty and scarcity, represented by the simple instructions that put food on the table. This book, like the object itself, 'exists as much in the imagination' as on the plate, a satisfying examination of the marvelous 'process and promise' of the humble recipe." - Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life

"A really great read." - Randomly Yours, Alex