Customer Reviews

The Williamsburg Cookbook: Traditional and Contemporary Recipes

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

 

 

Rated by "USA Today" as one of the six all-time classic southern cookbooks. With its elegant cover and photographs and distinquished historical narrative, afficionados of the taverns of Colonial Williamsurg (especially the King's Arms Tavern, that the author was hired by the Rockefeller family to run) will gain accolades for replicating the cookbook's user-friendly American colonial recipes. Time and again, my guests have asked me to prepare the eggnog pie I made last year and the wassail. Other favorites are the game pie, Sally Lunn bread and cheese souffle. This is one of those cookbooks that everyone must have on their shelf, like "The Joy of Cooking." Also, if you don't get it here online, you've got to go all the way to Williamsburg, the only other place it's sold. I have also given "The Williamsburg Cookbook" as a gift. It is so beautiful, it could easily be an art book for the coffee table. If you are buying your first copy, I envy you the excitement you'll have on your enchanting find.

I spent my honeymoon in Williamsburg and my family returns there every other year. This cookbook has allowed me to relive many happy hours in Colonial Williamsburg. The book is gorgeous and my only complaint is that it needed more photos. Classic colonial Southern cooking is displayed here:Sally Lunn bread, Salamagundi, and the best pound cake I've ever tasted. If you can find it you and anyone who eats the food will be happy.

Chow down, y'all.

This is a wonderful cookbook that collects historic recipes from the inns and taverns of American Colonial times. The recipes include main dishes, sauces, salads, sides, desserts, bread, and beverages. It has great historical information and tidbits, as well as photos and illustrations. I found the recipes were easy to use, they work as promised and pleased our crowd at home. A terrific gift for any fan or Colonial items or cook books. My own copy is the softcover updated and enlarged edition from 1975. After doing some research on the internet, I noticed that a lot of people preferred these editions to the version made in the 1990's.

This is the same book that we saw at Williamsburg and couldn't find at home. It came promptly and I was pleased that it came in great condition in the wrapper.

The Willliamsburg Cookbook is a good blend of traditional recipes and contemporary cooking. Recipes linked to the taverns of Williamsburg are true to the foods served there, especially the Brunswick Stew, cornbread, Rice pudding and Sally Lunn. Recreating them is well portrayed. For those who enjoy "reading" a cookbook, the introduction was well written and served to help the cook understand the culinary period.

I was surprised to see this book I bought 21 years ago on this website and must say, I got it because of the rice pudding and the peanut soup recipes when we ate the Tavern, I just had to have these recipes. They are the recipes they used in the other Tavern restaurants as well. I hope everyone who buys this enjoys this book as much as I have.

`The Williamsburg Cookbook, Updated and Enlarged!' is one of those books I bought as a souvenir with relatively little thought of actually cooking from it, since I had no strong interest in recreating meals from Colonial Virginia. But then, I reviewed another `period piece' cookbook from Walter Staib of Philadelphia's City Tavern, which has also been transformed into a historically `accurate' culinary location. So, since I saw that this Williamsburg offering came up under a search for exemplars of `Southern' cooking, I thought it only fair that I give it a review.

For starters, just like Staib's City Tavern books, the recipes in the Williamsburg book are adapted to modern kitchens with an eye to doing a close simulation of the colonial dish. So, I played my little game of locating how many anachronistic ingredients (those invented after 1775) I could find in the recipes. I was happy to find so few. The ones that stood out were true baking powder, which was invented around 1850 and Worchestershire sauce, invented (by accident) in the 1840's. The few others I found such as `saltines' would have easily found period items. I suspect that it would not be hard to find ship's biscuits in the Virginia capitol of the time. I am happy to allow things such as canned tomatoes, as there is no question in my mind that home canning of vegetables was common. I thankfully found no reference to margarine. I am just a bit skeptical about the prominent use of mayonnaise, especially as the book provides no recipe for homemade mayonnaise, which did not appear in print until 1804. But, I'm sure cooks have been using egg-emulsified oil or fat in the 18th century, even if they didn't use that French name. It's just that I'm sure there was no Hellman's mayonnaise jars in 1776. (All dates are from Alan Davidson's `The Oxford Companion to Food'.) I am just a bit suspicious of the use of bouillon cubes in the place of fresh stock, but I can find no documentation of when dried bouillon was first made. The `Larousse Gastronomique' does refer to it's existing in France as early as 1704, but I believe commercial preparations were not done until the 19th century.

Now, allowing for the anachronisms, how accurate are the recipes otherwise. I am not an expert on colonial Virginia cuisine, but I have references from James Villas, who IS something of an expert on Southern cooking, having been writing about it for the last 40 years. So, I compared his recipe for Virginia Brunswick stew to the one from Williamsburg (it happens to be the stew pictured on the cover of the book). Both sources agreed on all principal ingredients except three. Williamsburg (Chowning's Tavern) includes okra and Villas includes fatback and butter. Oddly, Villas also gives a recipe for Georgia Brunswick Stew which does include okra, so I give Williamsburg a B on authenticity, primarily on the exclusion of all fats. While Villas has both fats, like Williamsburg, they are not used to saute anything, so the techniques for cooking are still very similar.

Another consideration is how good are the recipes. It seems to me that most of the recipes are remarkably simple, and I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that they assume using modern blenders, food processors, and stand mixers. One variety of recipe which always interest me is for turtle soup, and I was delighted to find recipes for turtle soup, turtle gumbo, and turtle stock. So, I compared this turtle soup with the one from `Emeril's Delmonico' and I found only a few differences, most of which can be chalked up to the Cajun influences on the New Orleans recipe. The procedure is almost identical; however, I suspect Emeril's recipe is just a bit more flavorful and interesting, as it includes ketchup, A1, and citrus in addition to the Cajun trinity (onion, celery, and green pepper). It also includes a lovely little hard-boiled egg garnish.

Everything considered, I still find this a delightful resource for interesting recipes. I often feel that a cookbook is worth space on my shelves if it has only one interesting recipe to offer. In this book, it's the oyster bisque, which is richer than the simple oyster stew, but much simpler to prepare than the elaborate crustacean bisques. And, you always have the fact that this is a great source for menus for entertaining, especially for 4th of July parties.

While the recipes have been modernized to reduce animal fats to some extent, there is no way these recipes can be considered `healthy' or dietetic. They are good because they make liberal use of oils and starches and salty ingredients; but then, you are not cooking from this book every day!

Some reviewers may have wanted more pictures. I don't miss them. On the other hand, I am very thankful for the largish print and the very nice layout of recipe titles, ingredient fonts, and procedure fonts. I do find some of the procedure writing to assume just a bit of kitchen wisdom, as when it assumes you will know to use dried herbs when it does not specify and that you will know that `divided' means you use half the ingredient in one place and half in another part of the recipe.

Overall, a very nice source of recipes `with a past'.