Books and My Food: Literary Quotations and Original Recipes for Every Day in the Year (Iowa Szathmary Culinary Arts Series)

Rating:
Summary: For true afficionados
Review: "Books and My Food" was originally published in 1904, and it is co-authored by Elisabeth Luther Cary and Annie M. Jones. Cary was an American literary and art critic, and Jones was the author of a cookbook.

This book contains 365 entries--one for each day of the year. Each entry begins with a quotation--either from literature or a quote by a literary giant, and each quote involves food. Writers quoted include Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, George Eliot, and many many more. The entry for the day then explains how to prepare the item mentioned in the quote--for example February 20th's entry is a quote by Thackeray complaining about boiled mutton, and then the authors describe how boiled mutton should be cooked.

All of the recipes are simple--you won't have to raid the spice traders for most of them--however--at the same time, most people really wouldn't want to actually cook a great deal of the recipes. Tastes have changed--most of us, for example, wouldn't be interested in September 23rd's offering of fried frogs' legs, or June 7th's boiled marrow bones, and then there's always March 23rd's boiled bacon.

Nonetheless, the quotes are marvellous, and I finally discovered on April 26th--exactly what syllabub is--and if I am ever inspired, I know how to make it.

The index at the back of the book very helpfully lists all the recipe items--a handy feature. One word of warning, however, this book is not for the inexperienced cook. The recipes do not include traditional oven temperatures, but refer instead to "a hot oven," "a quick oven", and some recipes lack any reference to oven temperatures at all, so you are on your own. This book is more for the peculiarity aspects than the practical cook book approach.

Rating:
Summary: dismal
Review: "Books and My Food" was originally published in 1904, and it is co-authored by Elisabeth Luther Cary and Annie M. Jones. Cary was an American literary and art critic, and Jones was the author of a cookbook.

This book contains 365 entries--one for each day of the year. Each entry begins with a quotation--either from literature or a quote by a literary giant, and each quote involves food. Writers quoted include Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, George Eliot, and many many more. The entry for the day then explains how to prepare the item mentioned in the quote--for example February 20th's entry is a quote by Thackeray complaining about boiled mutton, and then the authors describe how boiled mutton should be cooked.

All of the recipes are simple--you won't have to raid the spice traders for most of them--however--at the same time, most people really wouldn't want to actually cook a great deal of the recipes. Tastes have changed--most of us, for example, wouldn't be interested in September 23rd's offering of fried frogs' legs, or June 7th's boiled marrow bones, and then there's always March 23rd's boiled bacon.

Nonetheless, the quotes are marvellous, and I finally discovered on April 26th--exactly what syllabub is--and if I am ever inspired, I know how to make it.

The index at the back of the book very helpfully lists all the recipe items--a handy feature. One word of warning, however, this book is not for the inexperienced cook. The recipes do not include traditional oven temperatures, but refer instead to "a hot oven," "a quick oven", and some recipes lack any reference to oven temperatures at all, so you are on your own. This book is more for the peculiarity aspects than the practical cook book approach.

Rating:
Summary: dismal
Review: The so-called literary quotations were culled from the same dozen or so writers and includes many duds nobody reads today (Mrs. Humphry Ward, Charles Reade--perhaps the most often quoted of them all). And even that's beside the point, since the quotations are always so short, often a single sentence no more than fifteen words long. As for the so-called recipes, they're just one or two paragraphs, running to no more than fifty, sixty words per entry (for both quotation and recipe), and they're completely superfluous. You get infinitely better recipes at the back of any cereal box. To put it another way, never have I seen such a gigantic waste of paper in so miniscule a book.