Fed on Purpose: A Foodoir of Tummermories
The kid who got fed became the man who feeds.
Fed on Purpose: From Peanut to Pop Pop is more than a cookbook. It is a foodoir: a memoir you can cook.
Brian Edward McDermott tells the story of a life through the meals and people that helped raise him. Some came from family kitchens. Some came from farms, campfires, holidays, road trips, and lean years when dinner began by looking at whatever happened to be left in the refrigerator. Some recipes were inherited. Others were improvised, remembered, repaired, or rebuilt completely.
But every one of them carries a story.
The journey begins with Peanut, the childhood name first given to Brian by his mother and later offered back to him by another person trying to make a frightened child feel welcome. It travels through The Road, where new places and new people added dishes to the table. And it arrives at Pop Pop, where the child who once depended upon other people to feed him becomes the grandfather setting the table himself.
Along the way are the foods that refuse to disappear from memory: loose meat from one of his earliest tables; cream crab descended through three generations and transformed from a beachside pot into Pop Pop's own version; Patty's practical Midwestern cooking; glorious sea scallops once treated like treasure; bacon cheeseburger beans born from stretching a pound of ground beef; Norwegian Christmas rosettes delicate enough to seem impossible; and a cake taught by Uncle Lee, a Vietnam veteran and rail hobo who demonstrated how cardboard, tuna cans, wax, and ingenuity could become an oven.
These aren't museum-piece recipes.
They are recipes that have lived.
They have been stretched when money was short, changed when ingredients weren't available, improved when circumstances allowed, argued over, seasoned differently, and passed from one set of hands to another.
That is the philosophy at the heart of Fed on Purpose:
Honor the cook, not the house.
Remember the plate someone managed to set in front of you. Keep the good thing they gave you. Then make it your own way.
Throughout the book, family recipes sit beside Brian's own versions, showing how food changes as it travels through generations. Stories and memories reveal the people behind the dishes, while occasional doses of "Pop Pop's Two Cents" settle important culinary matters, including why jarred garlic has earned its place in the refrigerator door, why some ingredients simply do not belong, and why calling a casserole a "hot dish" remains deeply questionable behavior.
Beneath the humor is a larger story about inheritance.
Scarcity taught the technique. Abundance changed the ingredients.
The lesson remained the same.
Feed somebody.
Fed on Purpose is for cooks, grandparents, parents, memoir readers, family historians, and anyone who has ever realized that a recipe card can preserve far more than measurements. It is about the people who fed us, the things we choose to carry forward, and the peculiar way a smell from a kitchen can suddenly return an entire room full of people to us.
Fed on purpose.
Fed for a purpose.
Fed toward a purpose.
Make it your own way. Then give it away.
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