The Upper East Side Cookbook: Setting the Table in a Time of Slender Means

Our conscientious recipe collector lives on a shoestring in New York’s fashionable Upper East Side. During the financial crisis she watches her well-heeled neighbors struggle to entertain and to create dinners in the style to which they are accustomed. Upscale but not uptight, Parsley Cresswell takes to her compact kitchen and cooks her way through the recession, inspired by the high standards that have spoiled her, and the expensive tastes she has acquired along the way, but also calling upon the primitive survival skills and recipes handed down from ancestors. “As a midwesterner, I look to the East Side as the real New York, and that bias is only amplified by reading about Parsley Cresswell and her kitchen adventures. She is a deep dish, indeed.” — Garrison Keillor