Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1029040 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Authentic 1829 recipes adapted for American kitchens provide details on everything from early preserving to drying herbs. Modern methods are compared with common hearth methods in an excellent cookbook which specializes in quick yet authentic American fare. -- Midwest Book Review

From the Back Cover
The release of the old edition of this much loved cookbook will coincide with the 50th anniversary of Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, a living history complex devoted to the American Colonial era. This wonderful revision has a fresh look and more than 20 new mouthwatering recipes that recall the authentic dishes of our American past. Youll learn how to preserve apples for year round use; how salted, preserved meats were freshened; how Election Cake got it's name; and how select the best fish for dinner. With a range of delicious recipes from roasts and fricassees to pies and puddings, a beautiful new design, and an easy to use square trim size, this is an historical cookbook to be treasured. 8 x 8, 254 pages, 24 photos, 50 illustrations, appendix, index

Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone for Historic Cookbooks
In the years that I've been collecting historic cookbooks and cookbooks adapting historic recipes, this is the best cookbook that I've ever run across. Historic cookbooks tends to fall into one of three categories: 1) Reprints of originals with no modern measuring equivalents or other information that enables a modern cook to reproduce the recipes. 2) Adaptations of historic recipes with modern ingredients and techniques but no indication of what the original recipe involved. 3) Dutch-oven cookbooks that may recreate some historic recipes, but again with little or no information about the original recipe. "Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook" is unusual in that it provides the text of 19th century cookbook author Lydia Child's original recipe, the modern adaptation, and the hearth-cooking technique. By comparing the old with the new, a cook should be able to use this cookbook to adapt recipes from other historic cookbooks that do not provide a modern version.

The editor has selected recipes that can be created with easily available ingredients--and has omitted recipes for things that few modern Americans would ever want to eat--such as a calf's head that is build with the windpipe hanging out of the pot to drain off cooking juices.

In addition to recipes for soups, main dishes, vegetables, breads and desserts, the cookbook provides information about early 19th century meals. One of the best features is a section on the various fire-building techniques that are necessary depending on the type of cooking--for instance, how to build a quick-cooking fire for frying versus a fire that will produce coals for slow-cooking techniques.

The recipes that I've tried so far turned out quite well. Raspberry Shrub, a refreshing beverage made with a sweetened rasperry vinegar, was a hit with our children. The Cider Cake, which I baked for my birthday, turned out more bread-like than cake-like, but was a hit with the party guests nonetheless. I'm definitely looking forward to experimenting with this cookbook.

Because you're not always going to have a stove...
Old Sturbridge Village sits in Central Massachusetts, just off the Mass Pike near the exit for I-84. It and Plimoth Plantation are probably the two best-known historical reconstruction museums in Massachusetts, with Plimoth Plantation showing the lives of the Pilgrims after they settled in Plymouth, and OSV showing a typical New England town of about 200 years later. Naturally they have a fair amount of information on the subject of what life was like, what clothing was fashionable, the structure of society in those days... and of course, what they ate, and more importantly for this review, how they cooked it.

Historical cookbooks actually aren't all that hard to come by; in fact, some of the sources for this book, including Amelia Simmons' American Cookery and Lydia Maria Child's The Frugal Housewife, are available as ebooks from Gutenberg as well as in hard copy reprints. But one of the things that makes the OSV Cookbook different is that where its source books gave only the recipes and assumed that the cook knew her/his way around the kitchen, this book tries to reconstruct many of the techniques for use in both historical (i.e. hearth-based) and modern kitchens. The modern recipes use standard kitchen equipment; naturally, the hearth versions use such items as dutch ovens (the camp style, with three legs), hanging pots, and brick ovens and explains how they are to be used in each recipe. The food is largely traditional New England food, heavy on the cornmeal and molasses, with a great assortment of baked goods and a few surprises such as macaroni and cheese that are not generally associated with early American food (though Thomas Jefferson was quite fond of the stuff). The original recipes as written in the source books are quoted at the top of each updated recipe, giving a flavor for the way cookbooks were written in those days. There are even notes on how to work with and prepare ingredients that differ between then and now (including instructions on how to prepare fresh yeast for bread baking and how herbs were used in early 19th c. New England).

The book does have some faults. Unfortunately, they're very strange ones, mostly organizational in nature. First, there are few equipment pictures in the place you'd expect to see them. They're there, but they're all over the book, and since the index covers only recipes, the reader is not necessarily going to know where to find the necessary picture in order to understand an instruction for an unusual piece of equipment (particularly the "tin kitchen", the traditional hearthside reflector oven that, described, sounds way more complicated than it really is). Second is the attribution issue. Recipes do recieve attribution (there is a two-page bibliography in the back of the book), but curiously, only in the index, where the peculiar entry structure chosen makes it somewhat confusing to tell whether the attribution is part of the name or the dish or not. It makes sense, after a while, but it's still needlessly cumbersome and too cryptic.

Overall, if you're a fan of antiquarian cooking, especially that of the American colonies, you really should have this book. The content more than makes up for its organizational flaws, and to someone experimenting with hearth cooking in any form this book is beyond essential, given that there are really very few books that discuss the subject (well, there's the Dutch oven books, but they're only a very small subset of the whole discipline). It's also a good introduction to old New England cooking in general. Grab it, but you might want to drop a note to Globe Pequot that it's been about twelve years since their last edition and it might be due for a bit of a cleanup and update.

Addendum 5/7/09: The third edition is now available, and while it adds little to no new content, it drastically improves the overall organization of the book. ***** for the new one.

Great recipes, fascinating connection to the past
I adore Old Sturbridge Village. The entire "town" is authentic 1860s buildings, farmland, animals, and more - including a lumber mill, tavern, pottery shed, tinsmith and more. This cookbook is the result of their research into life back then.

Unlike other historic cookbooks which either give you just a "modern version" or the "original version" (with terms that can be cryptic), this one gives you both. You get the original instructions, and then a modern translation, with ideas about ways to substitute They have both a modern stove version as well as a hearth version, if you have access to a fire and want to cook over it. If it's something unusual, like suspending a chicken on a string, they even include drawings to help you figure that out.

People interested in early American cooking might be fascinated to learn how "normal" their meals could be. They ate macaroni and cheese. They enjoyed fish chowder, apple pie, veal cutlets and coffee. You can easily create a meal that your modern guests would love, and expose them to what life was like in the 1800s.

Well recommended!