Prairie Home Cooking: 400 Recipes that Celebrate the Bountiful Harvests, Creative Cooks,... at Chef2Chef

Once you get over to the Amish Frolic, you'll find Orange-Mint Thresher's Drink, Firehouse Tomatoes, Pickled Beets, Baked Macaroni and Cheddar, Scalloped Peaches-and-Cream Corn, Buttermilk-Oatmeal Bread, New Prague Meatloaf, Norwegian Potato Doughnuts, and Old-fashioned Chocolate Cakes with Boiled Frosting. And then there's supper to think about next.

Take the better part of Europe, heavy on the North and the Central, tip it up on one end, and sprinkle liberally across Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, let sit for 100 years of proud cooking, and 400 of the recipes that remain will be found in Prairie Home Cooking.

Anyone connected to a farm somewhere along the line will find this book comforting. Anyone with an abundant backyard garden will love this book for its relishes and canned goods. Anyone who ever wondered about the Midwest is in for a thorough education. And eating is only part of it. Fertig fills her pages with wonderful detail about the places and the people that have made up the American Midwest ever since the first plow broke through prairie sod.--Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
Fertig (Pure Prairie and Que Queens) uses her native knowledge of the heartland (and parts of Canada) and its cultural patchwork to create dishes that go beyond the dreaded Campbell soup casseroles without losing that essential ingredientAcomfort. For reliable, filling recipes that make great leftovers, this is the ticket. Hearty appetites will appreciate Polish Wild Mushroom and Potato Soup or Wisconsin Cheddar Beer Soup. For spicier fare there's Santa Fe Trail Smothered Steak. The book's strong point is the sinful, filling food category, which includes Baked Macaroni and Cheddar and Golden Nugget Custard. The breakfast section (St. Louis Gooey Coffee Cake, Gingerbread Waffles with Pear Sauce) appeals any time of day. Cooks will learn that Church Supper Chicken and Wild Rice Hot Dish, more than a casserole, is a Minnesotan potluck rite of passage. Tucked into every nook of this exhaustive collection are what may be the best treats of allAoriginal jellies and sides (Raspberries and Red Currants in Honeysuckle Jelly) that conjure up stops at roadside country stands. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reader Reviews
I got on to this cookbook through a friend who is also mad keen on Laura Ingalls wilder - (I love those books and have the little house cookbook. At first I thought this book would be more of the same - but this is so much more! Unrestrained by the limitations of Ma's cooking and other things described in the little house books - this is a wealth of heartland home cooking which is presented extremely well also.This isn't a fancy book - there are no styled photos of steamy puddings and roasts - but rather it is simply presented with recipes following one another and illustrated with very tasteful line drawings where appropriateThe books presentation I really liked overall - (I thought I would say this quickly - while I love my lush Nigella-style books - I do like the simpler ones when they are done well.The beauty of this book is it is all recipes and handy information about the cooking itself. The availability of items - the cooking of what was around (ie chokeberries etc) and some wonderful tips such as how to make your own sourdough starter - some excellent tips on how to do chicken and old fashioned pickles etc which you just don't see around much these days (watermelon rind!)It is a good sized book, and for someone who lives in New Zealand, I found it stacked full of things which I wouldn't normally cook as we have an almost entirely indigenous and British heritage - there is little influence in our culture of the Scandanavian for instance which seems to be very strongly prevalent in the reipces. I say this because it might be that Mid West America still does many of these tasty recipes - but for me the delicious mixture of old fashioned recipes and exotic mixtures were fascinatingThis book is definitely at the most accesible part of my cooking shelf and is thumbed through a lot. Comment | (Report this)