Picnic

A Year of Picnics

Everyone loves picnicking—dining in the great outdoors, cozied up on blankets, and surrounded by the beauty of the natural world. Now imagine doing it year-round, where the setting speaks to the foods served, and you've got A Year of Picnics! Savor good food and good company while lounging beneath the shady canopy of trees or under the sparkle of a starry sky. With just a picnic blanket and a little inspiration, you can transform mealtimes into an opportunity to relax, connect, and enjoy the outdoors. A Year of Picnics presents everything you need to picnic through the seasons, with over 70 picnic-perfect recipes, tips on selecting your location, advice for packing your basket, and creative ideas for outdoor activities. Through 20 themed picnics—celebrate the bounty of summer produce with a Table to Farm Picnic or revel in the colors of autumn with a Falling Leaves Picnic—you’ll discover the ways food can be elevated by your surroundings. From mountaintops to meadows, rooftops to formal gardens, let your picnicking take you to new places.

Picnics and Porcupines

Journey to the edges of the Great Lakes in this engaging history of picnicking, wilderness, and foodways. Winner: Best Book, Food and Nature, Gourmand Awards! Michigan State History Award Winner! This stunning venture into the American picnic explores how innovation, exploitation, and the changing wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula have shaped the experience of eating outdoors. From a photo of her grandmother picnicking in 1911, to the outdoor lunches of miners and loggers, to the picnics of vacationing celebrities like Henry Ford and Ernest Hemingway, author Candice Goucher opens an aperture into historic memories of picnics past to consider what the picnic sparks in our senses and to bring the borderlands of humans and nature into view. Through pictures, postcards, paintings, and recipes, Goucher traces the creation of a modern notion of wilderness as it emerged in the North American imagination and popular culture to navigate an entangled environmental and culinary history of the Upper Peninsula. Drawing on themes from Indigenous knowledge and the African American experience to labor activism and women's history, this tantalizing chronicle offers a taste of Americana, seasoned by the changing global forces of industrialization, transportation, immigration, tourism, war, and climate.

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