America's Founding Food by Keith Stavely

filled with information and recipes that will enlighten and enthrall anyone interested in food, cooking, or social history.'- ForeWord Verdict: Well done and highly recommended for foodies and historians.'- Library Journal With a few illustrations and a handy index, the work is well documented with endnotes and a lengthy bibliography. The authors also do an excellent job at portraying the depth and variety of New England food history, which is much richer than one would expect. The heart of the book is the recipes, from the original cookbooks ranging from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, complete with original wording, spelling, and grammar and 'commentaries to aid in historical understanding.' Reading the original cook's recipe and the authors' explanation of it adds much to readers' understanding and appreciation of the topic. The first section is a short social history of food in America, which provides helpful context for the historical recipes. 'In this unexpected gem in the ocean of works on food, librarians Stavely and Fitzgerald have crafted a 'richly contextualized critical anthology' of New England's food heritage. Cox, author of Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism 'This is an elegantly written, well conceived, and compelling work. Northern Hospitality will equip readers with all the tools they need for both historical understanding and kitchen adventure.

Going beyond reprints of single cookbooks and bland adaptations of historic recipes, this richly contextualized critical anthology puts the New England cooking tradition on display in all its unexpected-and delicious-complexity. From pottage to pie crust, from caudle to calf's head, historic methods and obscure meanings are thoroughly-sometimes humorously-explained. Each chapter, and each section within each chapter, is also prefaced by a brief introductory essay.

Recipes are presented in their original textual forms and are accompanied by commentaries designed to make them more accessible to the modern reader. Readers can sample regional offerings grouped into the categories of the liquid one-pot meal, fish, fowl, meat and game, pie, pudding, bread, and cake. In this enticing anthology of almost 400 historic New England recipes from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, you will be treated to such dishes as wine-soaked bass served with oysters and cranberries, roast shoulder of lamb seasoned with sweet herbs, almond cheesecake infused with rosewater, robust Connecticut brown bread, zesty ginger nuts, and high-peaked White Mountain cake.īeginning with four chapters placing the region's best-known cookbook authors and their works in nuanced historical context, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald then proceed to offer a ten-chapter cornucopia of culinary temptation. If you think traditional New England cooking is little more than baked beans and clam chowder, think again.

America's Founding Food by Keith Stavely