front cover of Cooking by the Book
Cooking by the Book
Food in Literature and Culture
Edited by Mary Anne Schofield
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
    The essays collected here explore the power and sensuality that food engenders within literature. The book permits the reader to sample food as a rhetorical structure, one that allows the individual writers to articulate the abstract concepts in a medium that is readily understandable.   
    The second part of Cooking by the Book turns to the more diverse food rhetorics of the marketplace. What, for example, is the fast food rhetoric? Why are there so many eating disorders in our society?  Is it possible to teach philosophy through cookery? How long has vegetarianism been popular?
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front cover of Northern Hospitality
Northern Hospitality
Cooking by the Book in New England
Keith Stavely
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
If you think traditional New England cooking is little more than baked beans and clam chowder, think again. In this enticing anthology of almost 400 historic New England recipes from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, you will be treated to such dishes as wine-soaked bass served with oysters and cranberries, roast shoulder of lamb seasoned with sweet herbs, almond cheesecake infused with rosewater, robust Connecticut brown bread, zesty ginger nuts, and high-peaked White Mountain cake.

Beginning with four chapters placing the region's best-known cookbook authors and their works in nuanced historical context, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald then proceed to offer a ten-chapter cornucopia of culinary temptation. Readers can sample regional offerings grouped into the categories of the liquid one-pot meal, fish, fowl, meat and game, pie, pudding, bread, and cake. Recipes are presented in their original textual forms and are accompanied by commentaries designed to make them more accessible to the modern reader. Each chapter, and each section within each chapter, is also prefaced by a brief introductory essay. From pottage to pie crust, from caudle to calf's head, historic methods and obscure meanings are thoroughly—sometimes humorously—explained.

Going beyond reprints of single cookbooks and bland adaptations of historic recipes, this richly contextualized critical anthology puts the New England cooking tradition on display in all its unexpected--and delicious--complexity. Northern Hospitality will equip readers with all the tools they need for both historical understanding and kitchen adventure.
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