Product Description

Ever heard of cold-oven pound cake, Hummingbird Cake, Mile-High Bologna Pie, or Mashed-Potato Fudge?

You'll find these recipes and more like them in America's Best Lost Recipes, a book that grew out of a nationwide contest for the best heirloom recipes, with recipes selected and put through their paces by the editors of Cook's Country magazine.

Evocative of both family ties and our national heritage, recipes like these are powerful touchstones for the past. Packed with full-color photos and enhanced features that make it a perfect gift (blank pages on which to detail your own family's lost recipes, a pocket to hold the recipes, and a bookplate), this collection features food you will want to make for your family and friends. Test kitchen notes tell the story of our recipe testing and detail what you need to know to be successful in the kitchen.

Contest entrants describe the recipes and history in their own words in brief introductions, lending this collection a narrative and personal quality few cookbooks possess. A slice of Americana, America's Best Lost Recipes aims to preserve the best our culinary heritage has to offer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20695 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10
• Released on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
Cook's Country magazine, published by the indefatigable America's Test Kitchen, also home to Cook's Illustrated magazine, culls homey recipes from cooks nationwide. America's Best Lost Recipes contains 120 of these traditional family formulas, judged worthy of modern attention. These include the likes of Summer Squash Soufflé, Poor Boy Stroganoff, Almond Crescents with Burnt Butter Icing, and Clara's Chocolate Torte.

As with other America's Test Kitchen efforts, the goal has been to present "best" versions of favorite dishes. Original recipes have thus been tweaked where necessary (for example, extra yeast has been added to a monkey bread formula to speed its preparation) to ensure convenient, tasty results. Included also are "biographical" notes that place recipes in context, and useful tips that explore the testing process and thus provide technical insights. Color photos and a spiral-bound book add to the attractiveness of this tempting collection. --Arthur Boehm

Review
Here are updated heirloom favorites including Corn Dodgers and Great-Aunt Ellen's Upside-Down Lemon Pudding Cake. Here, too, are the stories surrounding such regional specialties as Benne Wafers, linked for centuries to South Carolina, where slaves were said to have smuggled sesame, or benne, seeds from Africa. A spiral-bound collection compiled by the editors of Cook's Country magazine, America's Best Lost Recipes includes notes on technique, photo how-tos and a pocket for your own stained recipe cards. If you're hankering for old-fashioned pleasures, look no further. --People Magazine

Customer Reviews

Beautifully bound... but where's the beef?!?
If the America's Test Kitchen folks would take the recipes from their new The Cook's Country Cookbook: Regional and Heirloom Favorites Tested and Reimagined for Today's Home Cooks, and put them into the format and binding of this text, then they'd have one of the best cookbooks on the market!

I have rarely come across a cookbook which is as user-friendly as "Lost Recipes" -- it's sturdy, it lies open perfectly, the paper stock is heavy and resists stains, the recipes are one-per-page with terrific color photos alongside many of the finished dishes, the fonts are quite readable, and there's a nice back section of lined pages for one's personal notes.

Unfortunately, a large number of the recipes in here are not of a sort which are going to hold much appeal for most home chefs in terms of feeding their families. Kolotny Borscht (p. 32) and Chocolate Marlow (p. 168) are just not the types of dishes which excite one's taste buds.

I bought this book, chiefly for two reasons:

1. to find some of the so-called "lost recipes" which I anticipated being in here (and they were not), and,

2. to have some really old-timey, good-quality, home-cooking recipes.


These expectations having not been fulfilled, this cookbook has been lying around in the way for a couple of months now. I'm going to pass it on to a niece who enjoys making recipes that are out on the fringe in the hope that she can find something in this text.

The staff of America's Test Kitchen is comprised of some really well-schooled and knowledgeable people but I wish they had worked with different "lost recipes" than the ones I found here. There are a total of 121 recipes to be found throughout the text and my wife and I could discover only six that we had any interest in trying -- here are the lonely six which we liked:

Cheese Puffs, (p. 3)

Szekely Goulash (Pork Stew with Sauerkraut), (p. 38)

Texas Chili Dogs, (p. 40)

Naked Ladies with Their Legs Crossed, (p. 68)

Gram's Doughnuts, (p. 71)

7-Up Cake, (p. 113)

For the price of the book, six recipes of interest manifested a notable disappointment. For a superb America's Test Kitchen Cookbook (in terms of both the format and the recipe quality), get this one: The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Heavy-Duty Revised Edition

Real recipes for real people, with great stories
I checked this book out at the library before I bought it, so I already knew it was a winner. It's a perfect cookbook - recipes that real people can make with ingredients we all have, great pictures and just enough history to make it interesting, but not distracting. Highly recommended.

Wonderful recipes and wonderful stories
I got this from the library and then had to order it. I've tried four recipes and they are all wonderful. My husband, who doesn't really like ham, loved the Ham Pie. The Blueberry bait boy is wonderful. The Kolaches were very tasty, low in calories and little sugar. The Ruskas were good (although could use a little more spice)but the dough was amazing and I'm going to use it in other recipes. I'm eager to try more.

The stories were an interesting read especially those that were invented in times of shortage.

For those others who wrote critiques. It would be nice if you had put what the error was you found.