BiblioVault - Books about Cooking

The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide

A History of Squares & Slices in the Windy City

Steve Dolinsky

Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is your comprehensive guide to the history of the styles, locales, and people that make the Windy City a prime destination for slices and pies. Most locals have strong opinions about whether thin, tavern-style, or deep-dish takes the crown, which toppings are essential, and who makes the best pie in town—and in Chicago, there's a destination for every preference. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago saw an unprecedented number of new pizzerias opening their doors, very few of which focused on the proverbial deep-dish. Several high-end chefs made the pivot to pizza, and in many cases, brought new ideas and styles, like East Coast Sicilians and thin, crispy (and cheeseless) Roman pies. With so many slices to try in the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods, it would seem impossible to find the best of the best.

Enter renowned food journalist Steve Dolinsky. He embarked on a memorable quest for his first book, Pizza City, USA: 101 Reasons Why Chicago Is America’s Greatest Pizza Town, tasting more than 185 pizzas all over the region. For his follow-up, Dolinsky focuses on the city’s pizzerias, while still honoring a few suburban stalwarts.

This user-friendly guide is organized by pizza style—including thin, tavern, artisan, Neapolitan, deep-dish, stuffed, by-the-slice, Roman, and Detroit—so you can find the right recommendation for every family member, visitor, and occasion. Dolinsky highlights his favorites, offers a pizza lover’s glossary so you can order like a pro, and shows you every pie he ate, so you can compare notes and cook up your next pizza night. With recipes, local beer pairings, gluten-free options, and more, The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is an essential resource both for locals and for visitors in search of a serious pizza getaway.

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United Tastes

The Making of the First American Cookbook

Keith Stavely

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

Winner of the 2017 Bruce Fraser Award from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History
The Library of Congress has designated American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons one of the eighty-eight "Books That Shaped America." Its recognition as "the first American cookbook" has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers, yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

Situating American Cookery within the post-Revolutionary effort to develop a distinct national identity, Stavely and Fitzgerald demonstrate the book's significance in cultural as well as culinary terms. Ultimately the separation between these categories dissolves as the authors show that the formation of "taste," in matters of food as well as other material expressions, was essential to building a consensus on what it was to be American. United Tastes explores multiple histories—of food, cookbooks, printing, material and literary culture, and region—to illuminate the meaning and affirm the importance of America's first cookbook.

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Up a Country Lane Cookbook

Evelyn Birkby

University of Iowa Press, 1993

What can Evelyn Birkby possibly do to follow up the success of Neighboring on the Air: Cooking with the KMA Radio Homemakers? She can do what she has done in writing Up a Country Lane Cookbook. For forty-three years she has written a column entitled "Up a Country Lane" for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel. Now she has chosen the best recipes from her column and interspersed them with a wealth of stories of rural life in the 1940s and 1950s, supplemented by a generous offering of vintage photographs. She has created a book that encompasses lost time.

With chapters on "The Garden," "Grocery Stores and Lockers," "Planting," and "Saturday Night in Town," to name a few, Up a Country Lane Cookbook recalls the noble simplicity of a life that has all but vanished. This is not to say that farm life in the forties and fifties was idyllic. As Birkby writes, "Underneath the pastoral exterior were threats of storms, droughts, ruined crops, low prices, sickness, and accidents."

Following the Second World War, many soldiers returned to mid-America and a life of farming. From her vantage point as a farm wife living in Mill Creek Valley in southwestern Iowa, Birkby observed the changes that accompanied improved roads, telephone service, and the easy availability of electricity. Her observations have been carefully recorded in her newspaper column, read by thousands of rural Iowans.

Up a Country Lane Cookbook is, then, much more than a cookbook. It is an evocation of a time in all its wonder and complexity which should be read by everyone from Evelyn Birkby's nearest neighbor in Mill Creek Valley to the city slicker seeking an education. Cook a meal of Plum-Glazed Baked Chicken, Elegant Peas, Creamed Cabbage, and Seven-Grain Bread, then finish it off with Frosted Ginger Creams with Fluffy Frosting. While the chicken is baking, read Evelyn's stories and think about the world the way it was.

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Urban Appetites

Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

Cindy R. Lobel

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you’d better believe there’s an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city’s population had grown to more than one million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States.

Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City’s food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.

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