Rating: 
Summary: Unique History Telling
Review: After reading A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, I couldn't help but feel a little ashamed about my own everday interaction with food. For example, every week I buy all the needed ingrediants for a salad or to use in my juicer and sure enough, one week later I'm throwing everything out, pratically untouched. This book was a kick in the pants of how lucky we are today to have such conveniences as fresh fruit and vegetables and sliced bread. It also showed me how much I take these items for granted. There are personal recollections and stories passed on through generations in this book that are absolutely fascinating and tell how people got by back in the day when not everything was so readily available. It also takes you through key moments in history. For example, During WWI and WWII the importance of planting Liberty and Victory Gardens. Another story talks of how in one particular Chinese family it was more important to a father that his little girl knew how to wash rice properly, considered a principal accomplishment of any Chinese female, than to go get an education. Another theme came up over and over again was the power of women's voices as mothers and homemakers who demanded fair pricing, strict sanitary guidleines, government funded programs to feed the poor. On top of all this there are recipes scattered throughout the book that are related to each era. Some you'll want to try and others....not so much. Great pictures included as well! Hope you enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful & Poetic - a journey for the soul
Review: From the very first words I read in this book I was captivated. Author Laura Schenone has found a wonderfully unique and enticing way to talk about a subject that touches each of our daily routines. She begins by briefly sharing her own family's very moving story and artfully wraps the theme of cooking and food into their lives. She then proceeds to take us on a journy through American Herstory (my word) - to learn about the many dimensions of women and their relationship to food/cooking. The book is beautifully written and is the kind of reading that stirs the imagination. I highly recommend this book. I showed it to my babysitter and she loved it so much I purchased a copy for her for her birthday. She then showed it to her sister who insisted on having her own copy. It's that kind of book! Enjoy...
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful & Poetic - a journey for the soul
Review: From the very first words I read in this book I was captivated. Author Laura Schenone has found a wonderfully unique and enticing way to talk about a subject that touches each of our daily routines. She begins by briefly sharing her own family's very moving story and artfully wraps the theme of cooking and food into their lives. She then proceeds to take us on a journy through American Herstory (my word) - to learn about the many dimensions of women and their relationship to food/cooking. The book is beautifully written and is the kind of reading that stirs the imagination. I highly recommend this book. I showed it to my babysitter and she loved it so much I purchased a copy for her for her birthday. She then showed it to her sister who insisted on having her own copy. It's that kind of book! Enjoy...
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!
Review: I found that, not only was Ms. Schenone's book entertaining and educational, it made me feel good about being a woman in a way no other book ever has. As I read the book, I kept thinking how interesting it is that no one has ever looked at the critical contribution that women have made through food, to the success and building of this country, in quite the same light!I enjoy cooking so I found that aspect of the book enjoyable. I also like history and Ms. Schenone's book does a superb job of tying the two together. I liked it so much I sent copies to all of my girl friends as well as female family members. I highly recommend it whether you are a "foodie" or a history buff.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!
Review: I found that, not only was Ms. Schenone's book entertaining and educational, it made me feel good about being a woman in a way no other book ever has. As I read the book, I kept thinking how interesting it is that no one has ever looked at the critical contribution that women have made through food, to the success and building of this country, in quite the same light! I enjoy cooking so I found that aspect of the book enjoyable. I also like history and Ms. Schenone's book does a superb job of tying the two together. I liked it so much I sent copies to all of my girl friends as well as female family members. I highly recommend it whether you are a "foodie" or a history buff.
Rating:
Summary: A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove
Review: I picked this up for my wife at Christmas but began reading it and decided I'd keep it for a while!
This is a beautiful book that offers so many images I haven't seen before, and the author's prose is so clean, and yet in many places so lyrical and personal.
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove weaves so many stories about how our mothers and grandmothers and their ancestors kept our cultures and traditions alive and yet also took part in the great events of our times and wrote a different kind of history in our nation. The author's own connection to and respect for her mother and grandmothers is given such warmth and life from the very beginning. When we see what women have done in the colonial days at Plymouth Rock to the Civil War and slavery, to the struggle to feed their families, through the worst of the industrial revolution to what nurses and volunteers did on the battlefields of the First World war, and on and on through the best and worst of the 20th century, Schenone makes such a powerful and honest impression.
Anyone who enjoys American history or just food and cooking will lose themselves for hours here. This presents a perspective on the women in our lives and the unfolding of American history that deserves so much more attention--and also lovely personal writing about the author's life and experiences. And the recipes and photos are presented beautifully."
Rating:
Summary: This NEEDED to be written
Review: If you enjoy a coziness factor in your life, you'll benefit from reading this book. It's fun and useful and educational. You'll come away with a new respect for the everyday love offerings dished out by Mom and Grandma and the matriarchs of generations and milleniums past. Little by little they all contribute to the building of a civilization. Wow! Inspiring reading about the over-looked contribution of everyday women and nurturers in our daily lives, and the food they give us. Very entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: Slow down and read this book
Review: Laura Schenone gives the reader so much powerful insight into the work and the love that goes into food and cooking--A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove is a wonderful way in this fast food nation to sit down with your daughter or your kids or friends and remember what home cooking and home meals are all about. For everyone who ever wanted to stop a crazy day and be comforted by food and family, this book brings it home.
Rating:
Summary: Illuminating history of women
Review: This ambitious history of women's role in the gathering, testing, production, mixing, and cooking of foods over many centuries taught me a great deal about food's basic role as emotional as well as physical sustenance. Schenone writes clearly and eloquently about the everyday work and lives of women. Schenone's exhaustive research is expertly brought together in a readable and personal tribute to women's lives. For this reason, I have bought the book for several women in my life, including my own mother. It is the kind of book which reminds us of our profound connection to the earth and to the women who have gone before us. It also moves the reader to reassess the contributions of our mothers and grandmothers in our own upbringings. It does that while entertaining the reader, and like a good meal, leaving us wanting more.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious Documentary on Women and Food in America
Review: This journalistic account of women and food by Laura Schenone has the air of a Ken Burns documentary in text and photographs filled with anecdotal information, 'sound byte' sidebars, and photographs and drawings contemporary to the times detailed in the text. The subject seems promising, as the subtitle is 'A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances'. First, I would like to congratulate the author and the book layout designers and artists at W. W. Norton for a very nicely composed and bound book. This accounted for at least half of the reason I decided to buy the book. The other half was the expectation of an entertaining read somewhere in the same style of Eric Schlosser's 'Fast Food Nation' or possibly an M. F. K. Fisher influenced collection of essays on women and food. I was disappointed for at least two reasons. The first was that unlike Schlosser's deservedly famous book, there was no central theme to the narrative. It was very much like Henri Bergson's complaint about 19th century philosophy of being a series of pearls with no connecting string. In the chapter on the later 20th century, there are paragraphs devoted to Julia Child, Rachael Carson, Alice Waters, Frances Moore Lappe, and Betty Friedan, with practically no common thread connecting them. They were all simply people who had an influence on food trends in the middle third of the last century. Even here, much was missed. I sincerely agree with the author's placing Julia Child as the most influential person in American culinary change in the 20th century, yet Schenone misses some of Child's biggest influences. She has been credited with single-handedly broadening the range of foodstuffs available in local supermarkets through her justifiably famous public TV shows. The second was that Ms. Schenone did not get all her facts right. I am willing to believe that this is true because of a failure of research and copy editing. Her assessment of Alice Waters, for example, buys into the myth of Lady Alice as the chef who is the driving force behind the California cuisine and thereby the new American cuisine. This overlooks the very important role played by both chef Jeremiah Tower and chef Paul Bertolli in the success of Chez Panisse. Tower especially is instrumental in the popularization of California cuisine, as he is willing to say over and over again. I suspect Tower may be overstating his case a bit, but in the foodie world, it is well known that while Waters deserves great credit for starting Chez Panisse and setting it's agenda, the real cooking and much of the culinary inspiration came from her (male) chefs. Other annoyances I found were occasional less than perfect wordsmithing. For example, she describes Martha Stewart as a 'media scion'. A scion of what? For all of Martha's blemishes, one of her more admirable aspects is that she is quite literally self-made, having practically invented the upper middle class lifestyle / entertaining genre from a lower middle class background. I do give the author points for giving Martha her due share of the credit in influencing American lifestyles. On the next page of her book, I take those points away due to a snide aside on the 'high-fallutin' style of Williams-Sonoma. The book deserves a lot of credit for it's many tales of women's life with food going back to pre-Columbian days. In the introduction, she even indulges in a bit of mythmaking about prehistoric women's' roles in food gathering and invention. I call this mythmaking since there are no bibliographic references to scholarly sources for the introduction. Beginning with Chapter 1, most anecdotes are backed up by scholarly references in the bibliography, although it should have been better done with notes connecting particular statements with specific references. It's ironic that the title cites a thousand years over a hot stove, while the text says that a proper iron stove was not available to the American housewife until after the Civil War. The book does redeem itself from several sins by recounting the extent to which commercially available foodstuffs were corrupted by processing in the 19th century before the advent of federal regulation with the Food and Drug Administration. These were the days when the difference between packaged and farmers market food was a whole lot more dramatic than it is today. If there is any theme to the book, it may be the irony that many food inventions originated with women, yet the world of commercial food production and haute cuisine cooking is largely the world of men. The former is easy to understand, as men ruled the world of commerce since Og traded furs with Mog in Neolithic times. The latter deserves some explanation, which I could not find in this book. My pet theory is that the work of a commercial restaurant kitchen demands a kind of athletic stamina of which men can reasonably be said to have more. I agree with the author that 'la cuisine Bourgeoisie' was the invention of women. Haute cuisine is based on the women's cuisine of the common folk, enhanced and codified by the chefs to nobility and the wealthy. The choice of photographs shows skill and some good research. The connection between the photographs with the text is sometimes less than perfect, but on balance, the selection of photographs is one of the best features of the book. The choice of recipes is fair, but generally simply illustrations of points in the main text rather than of any real culinary value. I generally enjoyed reading the book, but I was disappointed by some inaccuracies when I had independent information on the subject. This made me suspect those chapters where I did not have confirming background information. I suspect the author would have done better to adapt a more strictly documentary tone. These aspects of the narrative succeed and the polemic tone in the book does not.
| 
