Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times »

Suzan Colón has written for O, the Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Jane, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, Nathan. 

What is the secret to finding hope in hard times?

When Suzan Colón was laid off from her dream job at a magazine during the economic downturn of 2008, she needed to cut her budget way, way back, and that meant home cooking. Her mother suggested, “Why don’t you look in Nana’s recipe folder?” In the basement, Suzan found the tattered treasure, full of handwritten and meticulously typed recipes, peppered with her grandmother Matilda’s commentary in the margins. Reading it, Suzan realized she had found something more than a collection of recipes—she had found the key to her family’s survival through hard times.

Suzan began re-creating Matilda’s “sturdy food” recipes for baked pork chops and beef stew, and Aunt Nettie’s clam chowder made with clams dug up by Suzan’s grandfather Charlie in Long Island Sound. And she began uncovering the stories of her resilient family’s past. Taking inspiration from stylish, indomitable Matilda, who was the sole support of her family as a teenager during the Great Depression (and who always answered “How are you?” with “Fabulous, never better!”), and from dashing, twice-widowed Charlie, Suzan starts to approach her own crisis with a sense of wonder and gratitude. It turns out that the gift to survive and thrive through hard times had been bred in her bones all along.

Cherries in Winter is an irresistible gem of a book. It makes you want to cook, it makes you want to know your own family’s stories, and, above all, it makes you feel rich no matter what.

Publishers Weekly

As the economy tanked throughout 2008, magazine editor Colón began strategizing and was better prepared when she lost her job. At her mother's suggestion, she unearthed her grandmother's recipe file, and with it a greater sensitivity about a family history that spanned the hardest years of the 20th century. The resulting book is half cooking memoir with recipes, some more practical than others, and partly family chronicle, some personalities more resilient and dimensional than others. The menfolk, including the narrator's husband and her forebears are mostly given their due (though the disappearance of Colón's biological father is elided), but the story reads as a substantial homage to a strong matriarchal line, from the author's own determined persona and voice to the prominent and similar roles played by her mother and her maternal grandmother. The narrative has ample Working Girl spunk and shifts deftly if quickly among stories and decades and geographies. (Nov.)

Preface 1

1 You're Home Early Tonight 11

2 Backbone 17

3 Soup Du Jour Déjà Vu 30

4 The Ladies of the Grange 41

5 The First National Coffee Can and Savings Bank 48

6 Desperate Housewife 59

7 Southern Comfort 73

8 One Potato, Two Potato Masher 94

9 Happy Wife, Happy Life 105

10 How Long Will It Keep? 115

11 Fine Vases, Cherries in Winter, and Other Lifesaving Devices 137

12 What Price Beauty? 149

13 Dressed for Success 157

14 Forecast: Bleak Today, Change of the Universe Providing Tomorrow 169

15 A Ten-Dollar Bet and A Five-Dollar Winnkr 179

16 We Wish You A Merry Tuesday 186

17 When In Doubt, Bake 195

18 Fabulous, Never Better 209

19 Leave The Dishes 218

Afterword 221

Recipe Index and Notes 229

Acknowledgments 235