And a letterpress studio called Salt & Cedar, founded by a husband-and-wife team, offers "Book and Bread" dinners (gourmet food followed by a bookbinding session).
The night we spent there, some 40 years ago, the bread at dinner was so hard that we began making jokes about using it for cannon fodder.
No one was packing protein bars or pristine produce; this group ate rations of salt pork and rustic bread for dinner and the same again for breakfast.
Asked what she would do, she shrugged and smiled, then told her 11-year-old son, "I guess we'll have cheese and bread for dinner again.
Though some critics were troubled by the unseemliness of such lavish display in the age of bread lines, "Dinner at Eight" was more than an escapist romp with the rich.
Recipes for many of Harpo's more popular items date from then, including large loaves of crusty Italian bread ($1.99), dinner rolls ($3.49 a dozen) and pizza ($1.25 a slice, $19 for a whole pie).
"As my punishment, they gave me one scoop of peanut butter, one scoop of jelly, and one piece of bread for dinner and made me sleep on the basement floor," she said.
Silvia's authority is a matter of brute force: she pummels Velvet for sneaking out of the house at night, for taking bread before dinner is served, for talking back, or, on one terrible occasion, for gazing in open pleasure at musicians on a subway platform, punishing her for exactly the quality that Ginger most prizes: "You stupid girl, you give everything away!
At the same time, these stories bring back memories of Lucy's childhood in that town, where they lived as social pariahs in her uncle's garage with no heat and "only a trickle of cold water from a makeshift sink," and often ate molasses on bread for dinner.
