The Great American Dessert Cookbook - Softcover

This sturdy collection of basic American treats is the cookbook you would create if you catalogued your favorite aunts' scribbled recipes and clippings from those "ladies' magazines" of old--and beyond. Standard favorites from the past three centuries are included, from Indian pudding to key lime pie to the once-ubiquitous pineapple-upside-down cake. Although ingredient proportions have been adapted for the modern kitchen (the traditional "one-pound-butter, one-pound-flour, one-pound-sugar, one-pound-eggs" pound cake has been modified for today's flour and sugar), recipes stick close to their usually simple origins. Language, too, remains simple: a rice pudding is placed in a "water bath," not a bain marie . Thoughtfully placed reproductions of old advertisements, snippets from 19th-century cookbooks and information on all-American gambits like the Vermont Maple Festival add to the volume's revivifying air of historical innocence. For anyone not lucky enough to possess a half-century-old family cookbook, this is a worthy substitute.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This cookbook features favorite old-fashioned desserts from Apple Pie and Carrot Cake to Chocolate Chip Cookies. Lively headnotes supply background and culinary anecdotes, boxes include excerpts from old cookbooks and cooking tips, and charmingly dated reproductions and advertisements illustrate the text. The recipes are familiar, but these are good versions of the classics, and the format is appealing. The paperback is a bargain for libraries with limited budgets.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.