Customer Reviews

The Colonial Cook (Colonial People)

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My kids have really enjoyed the Colonial People series of books. This book focuses on cooking in Colonial times. It has information on cooking over fires, colonial cookware and gadgets, kitchen houses, dependencies (smokehouse, dairy, spring house, etc), foods that colonial people grew and raised, and how flour was made. It also has a small recipe section in the back (9 recipes). It has great photographs of historical interpreters cooking, tending plants and animals, and preparing foods. It also has wonderful illustrations. We really like the the cross section illustrations that show how the gristmill worked and how the dependencies were built.

The workings of a colonial kitchen are surprisingly well-detailed in this lavishly illustrated book by Bobbie Kalman. Who was in the kitchen, how they worked, the foods and gadgets that they used plus much more is presented in a lively manner that will stimulate further interest in the subject. Native American and African American cooking are, of course, included.

18th century recipes for modern cooks are here, and some new family favorites are sure to be among them. If you haven't had peanut soup ... well, you just don't know how to live!

"The Colonial Cookbook" is not a cookbook at all, in the adult sense. It is a hodgepodge of general historical comments, suitable for a grade school history class. It has a few generic recipes like Hasty Pudding and Peanut Soup. I found more and better colonial recipes in a 15 minute Internet search. This book may well have been pulled together in a high school home economics class, because many of the photos are teen age girls awkwardly posed over a food item or Duckwalls quality prints of colonial life.

There was nothing in the Amazon description of this book that correctly identified the contents or reading level. It is not a cookbook or a historical text,
the artwork is amateurish, and the contents is almost entirely common knowledge generalizations about Colonial America. Here is an excerpt:

WHO WAS THE COLONIAL COOK?
In many colonial homes, the woman of the family ran the household. She was responsible for preparing, preserving, and cooking food. If she had daughters, they helped her with the chores. The daughters peeled potatoes, gathered eggs, churned butter, helped bake bread, and brough water from the well.

Want more of that? Buy the book.

Amazon has some responsibility for accurate description of any product it sells. Accurate description of this book was lacking. Oh well. I was looking for a Colonial cookbook when I threw my money away on this one. I'll keep looking.