Customer Reviews

Mrs. Restino's Country kitchen: The complete wood stove cookbook

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I have had a copy of "Mrs. Restino's Country Kitchen" since it was published in 1976. Its cover is now tattered and creased, quite a few of the pages are stuck together with unidentifiable food particles, and not long ago I finally had to repair the collapsing spine with tape -- that's how much I've used this book in the last 24 years. Ironically, I was never a back-to-nature person, a vegetarian, or a hippie -- I simply appreciated this book for its intelligent, clear-eyed approach to food and cooking. Over the years I grew to depend on it whenever I needed an idea for preparing an unfamiliar vegetable, or if I happened to have odds and ends lying around and didn't quite know what to do with them. Recently I've been using it more than ever, since my significant other is a botanist and a fine gardener, and I've discovered a little of the excitement of growing fresh vegetables, albeit in a tiny urban garden. In short, I would recommend this book to anybody, rural or urban, carnivore or vegetarian, hippie or yuppie -- Restino's writing style is straightforward, unsentimental, charming, full of character, and clearly comprehensible. You don't have to cook on a wood stove to be infected by her honesty, her clarity, or her very understandable desire to know for a certainty where one's food comes from. As a footnote -- this book, and the distinct picture it provides of its author, affected me personally, to the point where I have sometimes found myself wondering what might have happened to Susan Restino -- did she survive the turbulent '70s, did she stay in the country, how did her own life turn out. I'm glad to see she is still active, and that this wonderful book seems to be forthcoming in a new edition. It richly deserves a multi-generational following.