To Set Before the King: Katharina Schratt's Festive Recipes (Iowa Szathmary Culinary Arts Series)

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Summary: A wonderful culinary guide to Old Vienna
Review: This book is fun to read on three levels. First it has a short biography of Katharina Schratt, the close friend and confidant of Emperor Franz Josef in 19th Century Vienna for over 30 years. This is a great story of a relationship that is legendary and inspirational - the original story of the Emperor and the actress. Following this are two completely different but complimentary cookbooks on 19th Century Viennese cooking. One is a translation of recipes used by Schratt and hand-copied into a notebook in 1905. These are brief and somewhat difficult for the modern reader to understand because they were never intended for publication and they are from a different time and place. To help the modern reader 13 pages of notes bring these recipes to life. Yet still, they will challenge all but the most experienced Austrian cooks. The second cookbook is called Bring Vienna to Your Table! and includes modern versions of many of the classic recipes of Old Vienna. In this section you will find all the famous dishes that make Viennese cooking world-renowned: strudel, Linzer torte, gugelhupf, stuffed cabbage, creamed spinach, rice sausages, goulash, tafelspitz, dumplings, spaetzle, and croustades. All the recipes are easy to follow. These are the real thing and not for those on a diet. Treat yourself to a little of Old Vienna and read this book. You may find yourself in the kitchen like I did with my mouth watering and ready to cook.

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Summary: hungarian cooking
Review: While lots of the cooking recepies outdated, the baking recepies still alive. I do not agree with the listings of so many gulash recepies, there are a lot bigger variety of the astro-hungarian cooking. Anyway I do love the book, there are many old treasures can be revived and used in the every day cooking. The baking is an other story. From the cresent recepie I was able to recreate my Grandmother's chesnut filled cresents, which she used to make for every Christmas. The walnut filling is missing some presoaked raisins, or without it the filling will be too dry. The linzer recepie will need more sour cream too, or the dough will be too dry. These are wonderfull old recepies, all should be treasured by all of us.