In Alice Neel's America, the common people's meal doesn't follow the starter-main-dessert grid. It's the single plate of the boardinghouse and diner counter: a starch that fills (toast, rice), a sauce or meat stretched to feed many with little, and coffee or soda from the fountain nearby. The table blends the cuisines of migrants — white Anglo resourcefulness, the rice of Puerto Rican Spanish Harlem, the Jewish soda fountain of Brooklyn. You eat what you have, you share, you stretch.

A little flour, butter, and milk: the queen technique of poor American cooking, transforming a handful of dried meat or a slice of bread into a meal that sticks to your ribs. It's the gesture that keeps recurring at Alice Neel's table during the Depression.