Stone Soup: Three Cookbooks For Lean Times

By T. Susan Chang

Published April 20, 2009 at 11:00 PM CDT

I'm sure you know the story of the hungry beggar who arrives in a miserly village with nothing but a kettle. He drops an ordinary stone in the kettle, adds some water and calls it "stone soup".

"It's delicious!" he cries to the gathering crowd. "Now if only I had an onion ..."

One by one, the villagers part with their produce — and their miserly ways. Before long, the pretend soup has become a real one: savory, aromatic and generous enough to feed the entire town.

It's a good story for lean times like these. Fact is, the miracle of dinner is an ordinary one — and these three books make it easy to conjure up mouthwatering meals from the most unmagical of ingredients.

T. Susan Chang

T. Susan Chang regularly writes about food and reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the Washington Post. She's the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table (2011). She lives in western Massachusetts, where she also teaches food writing at Bay Path College and Smith College. She blogs at Cookbooks for Dinner.

See stories by T. Susan Chang