Customer Reviews

Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters: More than 100 Years of Recipes Discovered from Family Cookbooks, Original Journals, Scraps of Paper, and Grandmother's Kitchen

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read a lot, have far more cookbooks than anyone would ever need, and have purchased books from Amazon for years, but I have never before felt so moved by a book that I just had to write a review. So, here is my first review.

These recipes are astoundling. Easy to make with ingredients on hand. Delicious. But more than all that, this is a wonderful cookbook to simply sit and enjoy. You can open it anywhere and find both a good recipe and relaxing insights into times gone by. The sisters who wrote the book love to bake, and that love shows up in each page, in the beautiful photos and in the nostalgic way the sisters speak of the women who, in cooking for their families, developed these recipes over decades past.

The recipes here, while based in days gone by, have all been updated for today's kitchen and are based in modern ingredients that are easy to find in any supermarket.

As anyone who bakes knows, baking is a science as well as an art, and the underlying chemistry is key to a successful outcome. In the first pages of the book, the sisters discuss the secrets that really good bakers know. Butter should not be salted, but sweet. Eggs should be at room temperature. etc. If you have ever wondered why you followed a baking recipe perfectly and the results were less than perfect, you will probably find your answer here.

So, get the cookbook to learn to bake. Get the cookbook for its simple, delicious recipes. Get the cookbook as a gift for someone you love. But most of all, get the cookbook for a relaxing glimpse of the world of our mothers and grandmothers. This is a wonderful, wonderful book.

I had a great opportunity at my work, Northeastern University, to attend a cooking-demo and book-signing by these two lovely ladies. Not only were they a hoot throughout their demonstration, but they also supplied us w/ a sampeling from this book to taste after the 2 recipies they made in 30 minutes or so.

I bought this book for myself as well as 2 other's for my mother and a close family friend. This book is THE perfect gift for someone setting up their first kitchen or newly entering the family. There is a chapter in the back of lined pages to preserve some of your own favorite or signature dishes as well as a great pocket to preserve or pass on some of your own.

I would see this as a perfect gift for a new bride with the addition of the women's families on both sides sharing some recipies in the pocket. Or simply a great place to put Grandma's Holiday Rolls that she gave you when you were first setting up house.

Preserving these recipies is a part of our families legacy and the Brass Sisters did a great job of making me assemble a list of recipies my mom use to bake all the time when I was growing up and ask her to make a copy for me to put there.

As far as the contents I would suggest that you try the Lemon Poppy Seed Coffee cake pg 41. It is easy fast and delish. My husband loves this cake and has asked me to make a few that he liked in the book.

I got the book yesterday, made the brownies with cream cheese in the middle and almonds on top; despite using a much bigger pan than they said to use they were hands down the best brownies I have made.

Made the biscuits this morning and wonderful taste- I prefer mine in a cake pan touching each other, but they were the perfect taste- no sugar- yea!.....

can't wait to make the tart/cookies with raspberry jam inside... and I have to say I have SHELVES of baking books I have never tried any recipes from.

I am tired of recipes that call for no sugar, no butter, no cream. They taste like nothing. I'd rather eat a little, or even a lot, just less often, and have something that doesn't taste like cardboard with chemicals added.

This is the kind of food my mother and grandmother baked, that made the kitchen smell incredible on an autumn day, and the whole house feel like a "home", not just a place where you happen to be.

I am not fat, and I think that eating baked goods such as the Brass sisters make satisfies that inner longing for comfort food. In the end, perhaps it is even weight-loss food, because it meets our needs and we don't have to go on eating one thing after another in an unfulfilled search for a remembered dream.

I like this book a lot. The recipes are good and delicious. Its lay-out is very pretty with lots of pictures (not of all the recipes). If you think of bread when you read the word 'baking', there are hardly any breadrecipes in this book, so don't buy it for breadrecipes. There are nice stories about the origin of the recipes.

It's not always easy to find a recipe (lets say for a cookie), because the different baking products are all over the place. I think a list of baking products by sort (cakes, cookies, puddings, pies, etc) would have made it a lot easier to find your way in this book. The index indicates that (p.e.) cake is to be found on page 40,42,96, 116 etc etc, without stating what kind of cake to expect on that page, so you'll have to look up all those pages to choose the cake you like. This is a shame for otherwise it's a very lovely book and recommendable for the recipes and it's good looks.

Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters: More than 100 Years of Recipes Discovered from Family Cookbooks, Original Journals, Scraps of Paper & Grandmother's Kitchen lovingly collects those intriguing bits of family history in the form of recipes scribbled on the backs of bridge tallies, grocery sacks, and yellowed bits of paper. Collected from used bookstores, flea markets, yard sales, and from friends, the dozens of vintage recipes ranging from the 1800s to the 1960s and today are snapshots in time, from the frugality of war rationing (Miss Emma Smith's War Cake) to bridge snacks (Graham Cracker Fudge, Mah Jong Candy) to Jewish comfort foods such as mandelbrot, hamantaschen, and challah.

Sheila and Marilynn Brass have tested, tweaked, and updated these long-lost gems to the modern kitchen, an all-important step to ensuring success. Why is this important? In the good old days, measurements could be imprecise, the texture and type of flour depended on the mill it was ground at, and sugar came in the form of hard cones of loaf sugar that had to be broken and pulverized. Often, oven temperatures were omitted. In addition, they have chosen to use commonly available ingredients (and they include a handy primer on essential ingredients and tips on what was used in the test recipe), making these heirloom baked goods accessible to everyone.

The recipes are grouped loosely by occasion, from breakfast (Pineapple Walnut Breakfast Bars, Helen's Coffee Bans, Cranberry-Orange Cream Scones) to immigrant recipes (Hazelnut Cake, Libby's Coconut Linzer Bars, Canadian Sugar Pie, Mrs. Mattie James' Jamaica Caramel Ice Cream), church recipes (Christian Service Cookies, Reverend Brown's Cake, Black Pepper Hush Puppies), bridge snacks, holiday recipes , and a chapter on chocolate (French Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting, Mocha Ricotta Cake with Ganache Topping, Chocolate Coconut Bread Pudding).

The authors make heirloom baking accessible to the modern cook, and add insightful notes on the original bakers along with kitchen tips on substitutions and variations. This is a wonderful gift for anyone who's longing to recreate the smells and tastes of grandmother's kitchen and a joyous ode to simpler times.

One small caveat: according to their website, there is a misprint in the recipe for Mrs. Marasi's Butterballs, on page 252. Change the amount to 1 cup of butter, not 2 cups of butter.

`Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters' by the Boston-based duo of Marilynn Brass and Sheila Brass promises, at the first look-see to be a glorified church social, self-published work, especially since the publisher is the very unfamiliar `Black Dog & Leventhal' Publishers. This belittling first impression vanishes as soon as one notices the blurb from uber-teacher of baking, Nick Malgieri on the back of the dust jacket. All memory of this notion disappears as soon as one opens to a typical recipe and appreciates that while all the recipes are rescued from hand-written notes by amateur bakers, they are thoroughly modern in presentation and in results their original authors should be justly proud.

My second impression from these recipes is the sense that the authors, or at least the recorders of these recipes were exceptionally skilled amateur bakers. They had to be, if only because of the erratic qualities of their ingredients and oven. They had to possess in abundance an art that may be lost among amateurs today. That is the art of adapting to ingredients, conditions, and the need to substitute when expensive ingredients were not available.

Another strong impression I get is how attractive the book is designed. Aside from being expert amateur bakers, the Brass sisters own a Boston area antiques business which specializes in culinary antiques. They are also affiliated with WGBH/Boston in the This Old House/Yankee Workshop/Victory Garden production unit. And, they serve as experts in culinary antiques for the PBS show, `Antiques Roadshow'. Photographs of the sisters' culinary antiques make superb decorations of the text in this book, alongside pics of the original handwritten recipes and expert snaps of the recipe results.

A quick look through the recipes will confirm the logical suspicion that most of these recipes were born and live a nice life in good old New England. None of my favorite Pennsylvania Dutch or southern specialities such as Shoofly pie, apple dumplings, Moravian sugar cake, corn bread or red velvet cake are here. It does have, however, other southern staples such as buttermilk biscuits and Dixie dinner rolls. I was especially happy to find an especially useful recipe for traditional strawberry shortcake that will work well for large groups of people.

One symptom of how `kosher' many of these recipes is found in the buttermilk biscuits recipe, which is virtually identical to my regular recipe from Nick Malgieri's `How to Bake' (however since this recipe is so generic, Professor Nick doesn't get credit for the recipe).

The sisters Brass make the excellent point (and stay true to it) that none of the recipes in this book require any unusual ingredients. The least familiar ingredient I saw was Mace; however, I know this is an ingredient familiar to many amateur bakers, since a good baking friend of mine in Baltimore routinely made `Mace cake'. The authors also state that all their recipes were tested with inexpensive supermarket brand flour and unsalted butter. They also manage to avoid `self-leavening' flour in all but one recipe. I am also especially happy that they generally use `active dry yeast' rather than the newer `rapid rise' yeast. The latter has some advantages, but it also has some drawbacks, and I learned to bake with `active dry yeast' and I suspect most others have as well. Oddly, they do switch over to a `quick-rising' yeast in their challah (Jewish Sabbath bread) egg bread.

The authors do not pinch pennies when it comes to baking pans and equipment. The list of useful baking pans on page 19 lists 25 unique size / shape combinations. And, of these 25, you really need two or more of at least four (4) of these sizes. They also endorse the use of a good stand mixer with a whisk, paddle, and dough hook attachment.

By far the best aspects of this book are the selection of recipes and the crystal clarity with which they describe the ingredients and procedure by which the recipe is made. I have seen better-written recipes, but only in the very best `teaching' cookbooks, and this is not a teaching cookbook. It is a cookbook for experienced amateur bakers. The challah recipe is a perfect example of this. Other cookbooks which specialize either in teaching techniques or in Jewish baking recipes will give you several pages of illustrated instructions on how to braid the challah (See `The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook' by Gloria Kauler Greene). This book has none of this `sidebar baking school' material. This all fits the picture the book gives of homemakers who didn't need Martha Stewart to show them how to bake biscuits or a pie or a birthday cake.

This book especially outshines other `homey, feel-good' cookbooks such as Jan Karon's `Mitford Cookbook and Recipe Reader' and the type of material you get from `Taste of Home' and `Good Housekeeping'.

The book does have a few shortcomings, but only for the total novice. The book is organized not in the usual way with chapters on `cookies, pastry, breads, quickbreads, cakes, ice cream, puddings, and candy'. Rather, it gives us recipes by event (breakfast, tea, minister's visit, bridge party, holidays, or family baking (with Mama). There are also chapters on cookies, chocolate, comfort food, and recipes from abroad. The problem here is how do you find a good muffin recipe? Fortunately, the index is competent, albeit not superior. By competent, I mean that the `Mary Williams' CoffeeCake with Streusel' recipe page will appear under `Mary Williams', `Cake', and `Streusel' (but not under `Coffee'). It is not superior in that it does not distinguish entries for `main recipe' references versus `ingredient' recipes. For example, brioche is used as an ingredient in six recipes, but there is no recipe for brioche in the book! This is unfortunante, as brioche is not as easy to find as you may think!

This is a great armchair AND practical recipe book of baking recipes, especially if you happen to be a regular contributor to bake sales!

I am giving this book five stars because every recipe I have tried has been, if not outrageously good, then at least delicious. Plus, the text is interesting and the pictures of antique kitchenware are great, making this my favorite cookbook to bake from right now. I am starting to notice a trend though, after making the chocolate peanut butter cake. It did not fit in the pan size that was recommended and ran out all over my oven. I then recalled when I made the lemon cheesecake it didn't fit in my smallish 9" springform pan either. I'll be paying more attention now; the recipes are worth this inconvenience.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book which was written in an easy to understand conversational tone. I love the history of the recipes and the clear instructions. I also liked that the authors tested store-brand ingredients against brand-name ingredients in order to be able to advise readers that we do not need to pay more to produce quality baked goods.

I liked that the recipes are for baked goods that I want to eat but do not duplicate recipes I have seen in other cookbooks (since I have more than 250 cookbooks, this is worth noting).

The book is published on sturdy pages and contains many photos of the finished products as well as of hand-written recipes and cooking tools of years gone by. My only complaint is a very minor one - I found the first page of each chapter a little hard to read as the text was superimposed over a decorative pattern.

I am grateful to the Brass sisters for "rescuing" these recipes from flea markets and antique stores in order to share them with the next generation of bakers. I encourage them to continue their search for lost recipes and to publish those, too.

This book would be an excellent gift, if you can bear to part with it!

this book has some really great recipes that are both a joy to read about and to try. I have not found one that hasn't turned out deliciously and I love the introduction to each. The sisters have a great way of making you feel like a friend. The down side and reason for 4 not 5 stars is the index and organization of the book. They have interspersed recipes together so chapters are not divided by cakes,pies, cookies, etc... but by headings like "a southern lady pours tea" or " coming to america". If the index was more informative, this would not be issue and lend a charm to the book but since the index is almost useless, the charming way they organized their cookbook makes it very difficult to find recipes. You almost have to look through the book from the beginning until you find what you are looking for.