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Compiled by four sisters and based on their recollections of their childhood in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe captures the glow of memories formed while growing up in a midwestern kitchen. From Lemon Meringue Pie to Tomato Soup Cake, from Mom's Chicken Pie to Grandma Noffke's Sliced Cucumber Pickles, this charming book features hundreds of recipes (some classic, some quirky), plus dozens of food and cooking-related anecdotes, memories, humorous asides, and period photos that transport readers back to Mom's or Grandma's kitchen, circa 1950.

The Sanvidges share a legacy of beloved dishes and food memories that resonate not just for their family, but for readers everywhere who grew up in a small midwestern town - or wish they had. Nostalgic, funny, and warmhearted, Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe celebrates the ways food and food memories link us to our past, and to each other. A delightful gift for food lovers of any generation.

Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s cafe guides showcase popular regional diner traditions. In her companion book Cafe Indiana she introduces travelers to the state’s top mom-and-pop restaurants. Now, Cafe Indiana Cookbook allows you to whip up local cafe classics yourself. Breakfast dishes range from Swiss Mennonite eier datch (egg pancakes) to biscuits and gravy; entree highlights include chicken with noodles (or with dumplings) and the iconic Hoosier breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. For dessert, try such Indiana favorites as apple dapple cake or rhubarb, coconut cream, or sugar cream pie . All 130 recipes have been kitchen-tested by Jolene Ketzenberger, food writer for the Indianapolis Star.
    Cafe Indiana Cookbook reveals the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure, and documents old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape—like southern Indiana’s fried brain sandwiches.

Finalist, Cookbook, Midwest Book Awards
 

Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style by Helen Walker Linsenmeyer presents a collection of family recipes created prior to 1900 and perfected from generation to generation, mirroring the delicious and distinctive kind of cookery produced by the mix of people who settled the Illinois Country during this period. Some recipes reflect a certain New England or Southern influence, while others echo a European heritage. All hark back to a simpler style of living, when cooking was plain yet flavorful.

The recipes specify the use of natural ingredients (including butter, lard, and suet) rather than synthetic or ready-mixed foods, which were unavailable in the 1800s. Cooking at the time was pure and unadulterated, and portions were large. Strength-giving food was essential to health and endurance; thus fare was pure, hearty, flavorful, and wholesome.

The many treasures of Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style include

• basic recipes for mead, originally served to the militiamen of Jackson County; sumac lemonade, made the Indian way; root beer, as it was originally made;

• soups of many kinds—from wholesome vegetable to savory sorrel leaf, enjoyed by the Kaskaskia French;

• old-fashioned fried beefsteak, classic American pot roast and gravy, as well as secret marinades to tenderize the tougher but more flavorful cuts of meat;

• methods for preparing and cooking rabbit, squirrel, wild turkey, venison, pheasant, rattlesnake, raccoon, buffalo, and fish;

• over one hundred recipes for wheat breads, sweet breads, corn breads, and pancakes;

• an array of delectable desserts and confections, including puddings, ice cream, taffy, and feathery-light cakes and pies;

• sections on the uses of herbs, spices, roots, and weeds; instructions for making sausage, jerky, and smoked fish and for drying one’s own fruits and vegetables; and household hints on everything from making lye soap to cooking for the sick.

And there are extra-special nuggets, too, for Mrs. Linsenmeyer laces her cookbook with interesting biographical notes on a number of the settlers and the origin of many of the foods they used. There is also a wealth of historical information on lifestyles and cooking before 1900, plus helpful tips on the use of old-fashioned cooking utensils.

A working cookbook complete in its coverage of every area of food preparation, Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style will be used and treasured as much today as its recipes were by families of an earlier century. The recipes are not gourmet, but they are certain to please today’s cooks, especially those interested in using local ingredients and getting back to a more natural way of cooking and eating.

Every craft beer has a story, and part of the fun is learning where the liquid gold in your glass comes from. In Fifty Must-Try Craft Beers of Ohio, veteran beer writer Rick Armon picks the can’t-miss brews in a roundup that will handily guide everyone from the newest beer aficionado to those with the most seasoned palates. Some are crowd pleasers, some are award winners, some are just plain unusual—the knockout beers included here are a tiny sample of what Ohio has to offer.

In the midst of the ongoing nationwide renaissance in local beer culture, Ohio has become a major center for the creation of quality craft brews, and Armon goes behind the scenes to figure out what accounts for the state’s beer alchemy. He asked the brewers themselves about the great idea or the happy accident that made each beer what it is. The book includes brewer profiles, quintessentially Ohio food pairings (sauerkraut balls and Cincinnati chili!), and more.

Beatrice Ojakangas, the oldest of ten children, came by it naturally—the cooking but also the pluck and perseverance that she's served up with her renowned Scandinavian dishes over the years. In the wake of the Moose Lake fires and famine of 1918, Ojakangas tells us in this delightful memoir-cum-cookbook, her grandfather sent for a Finnish mail-order bride—and got one who’d trained as a chef.

Ojakangas’s stories, are, unsurprisingly, steeped in food lore: tales of cardamom and rye, baking salt cake at the age of five on a wood-burning stove, growing up on venison, making egg rolls for Chun King, and sending off a Pillsbury Bake Off–winning recipe without ever making it. And from here, how those early roots flourished through hard work and dedication to a successful (but never easy) career in food writing and a much wider world, from working for pizza roll king Jeno Paulucci to researching food traditions in Finland and appearing with Julia Child and Martha Stewart—all without ever leaving behind the lessons learned on the farm. As she says, “first you have to start with good ingredients and a good idea.”

Chock-full of recipes, anecdotes, and a kind humor that bring to vivid life the Finnish culture of northern Minnesota as well as the wider culinary world, Homemade delivers the savory and the sweet in equal measures and casts a warm light on a rich slice of the country’s cooking heritage.

When is a cookbook more than just a cookbook? When it’s a gateway to our culinary heritage. For well over a hundred years, Missouri’s cookbooks have helped readers serve up tasty dishes to the state’s tables, but these publications also document the evolution of our kitchens and households.

Pot Roast,Politics, and Ants in the Pantry, a treasure trove of anecdotes and nuggets of historical information about cookery in the Show-Me State, draws from more than 150 publications to reveal Missouri’s cookbook heritage and to deliver a generous sampling of recipes. Carol Fisher and John Fisher look back to manuscript cookbooks from 1821 St. Louis, then progress through the years and around Missouri before arriving at today’s online recipes. Along the way, they dish out servings of kitchen medicine, household hints, and cookbook literature gleaned from the state’s cache of culinary gems.

From handwritten family recipe collections and mimeographed publications to glossy color editions, the texts the Fishers have obtained from libraries and historical societies as well as their own extensive cookbook collection include such curiosities as the Julia Clark Household Memoranda Book from the William Clark papers, an 1880 production by the Ladies of St. Louis called My Mother’s Cookbook, Mary Foote Henderson’s Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving, and Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground. They tell how various ethnic communities raised money by creating cookbooks, how the state’s Beef Council and Pork Association put recipes on the Internet, and how restaurants like the Blue Owl in Kimmswick and Stephenson’s Apple Farm Restaurant near Kansas City enhanced their reputations with their own cookbooks. Festival cookbooks, company cookbooks, even cookbooks tied to world events—they’re all here in one delightful book.

In this vastly entertaining review, readers will learn where to find recipes for dandelion wine, mock turtle soup (requiring a large calf’s head split open by the butcher), and vinegar pie—as well as the curative properties of potato water, tips for raising chickens in the basement, and even “how to cook a husband.” An extensive bibliography includes information to help readers track down the books discussed and also those on their own wish lists.

Pot Roast, Politics, and Ants in the Pantry: Missouri’s Cookbook Heritage shows how, instead of being just collections of recipes, cookbooks provide history lessons, document changing food ways, and demonstrate the cultural diversity of the state. From Julia Clark’s simple frontier recipes for puddings and preserves to Irma Rombauer’s encyclopedic Joy of Cooking—originally self-published in Missouri—Carol Fisher and John Fisher have laid out a smorgasbord of reading pleasure for cookbook collectors, nostalgia buffs, and gourmands alike.

Growing up in a Norwegian American community imbued with the customs and foods of the Old Country, Carrie Young recalls how her mother and her neighbors skillfully blended Scandinavian with what they always called the American style of cooking. Young recounts how her mother, Carrine Gafkjen—after homesteading as a single woman in 1904—cooked for a large threshing crew during harvest season. Living and cooking around the clock in a cook car the size of a Pullman kitchen, she delighted the crew with her soda pancakes and her sour cream doughnuts, her fattigman (Poor Man's Cookies) and her fabulous North Dakota Lemon Meringue Pie.

During holidays lutefisk and lefse reigned supreme, but when the Glorified Rice fad swept the country in the thirties women broke new ground with inventive variations. And the short-lived but intensely experienced Three-Day Bun Era (when the buns became so ethereal they were in danger of floating off the plate) kept the Ladies Aid luncheons competitive. Whatever the times, in good years or bad, there was always the solace ofKaffe Tid, the forenoon and afternoon coffee time, when the table was set with smor og brod (butter and bread) and something sweet, like a Whipped Cream Cake or Devil's Food Cake with Rhubarb Sauce.

This book will appeal to those who feel nostalgia for a parent's or grandparent's cooking, to those who have a longing for the heartier fare of times past. The author's daughter, Felicia Young, who has "cooked Scandinavian since she was old enough to hold a lefse stick," has compiled and tested the seventy-two recipes accompanying this joyful memoir.

Seasons of Plenty provides colorful descriptions, folk stories, appealing photgraphs and illustrations, excerpts from journals and ledgers, recipes for good food like savory dumpling soup, mashed potatoes with browned bread crumbs, Sauerbraten, and feather light apple fritters.

Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.

An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.

Eighty delicious, imaginative recipes from the Star Tribune’s beloved annual cookie contest, with mouth-watering pictures and bakers’ stories

It’s cold in Minnesota, especially around the holidays, and there’s nothing like baking a batch of cookies to warm the kitchen and the heart. A celebration of the rich traditions, creativity, and taste of the region, The Great Minnesota Cookie Book collects the best-loved recipes and baking lore from fifteen years of the Star Tribune’s popular holiday cookie contest. 

Drop cookies and cutouts, refrigerator cookies and bars; Swedish shortbread, Viennese wafers, and French–Swiss butter cookies; almond palmiers; chai crescents and taffy treats; snowball clippers, cherry pinwheels, lime coolers, and chocolate-drizzled churros: a dizzying array and all delightful, the recipes in this book recall memories of holidays past and inspire the promise of happy gatherings to come. 

These are winning cookies in every sense, the best of the best chosen by the contest’s judges, accompanied by beautiful photographs as instructive as they are enticing. A treat for any occasion, whether party, bake sale, or after-school snack, each time- and taste-tested recipe is perfect for starting a tradition of one’s own.

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.