The 1st American Cookie Lady: Recipes from a 1917 Cookie Diary

by Barbara Swell

Overview

The 1st American Cookie Lady is based on the 76-page cookie diary of Anna Cookie Covington, which contains 208 delicious recipes from a WWI-era American kitchen. Annas journal, kept between 1917 and 1920, predates the first cookie recipe books published in the 1920s and just might be the first American collection of cookie recipes. Even though Barbara presents these recipes exactly as they appear in the original diary, she also shares helpful tips and hints on baking, updates for many of the recipes, fun cookie poems, baking superstitions, and dozens of photos and illustrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781883206499
Publisher:	Native Ground Music
Publication date:	09/08/2005
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	827,963
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

Editorial Reviews

Swell has written several books on America's cooking history (e.g., Log Cabin Cooking), so in October 2004, she was thrilled to find on eBay a cookie recipe collection dated 1917 to 1920. It was in a journal by Anna "Cookie" Covington, intended to be passed down to her children, but the unblemished pages the author received indicate that never happened. Swell has taken the original recipes and arranged them by cookie type (sugar, molasses, novelty, etc.) and added, where needed, more contemporary instructions. This makes many of these cookies easy to reproduce by modern cooks. Yet one is reminded that this is a unique historical collection by the number of recipes with only small differences (20 molasses cookies, 21 ginger cookies). To put the recipes in context, Swell intersperses information on the ingredients and equipment available to the early 1900s cook as well as the effects of World War I. She includes a page from Covington's journal, a bibliography of historical cooking resources, and an index. Recommended for larger collections.-Ginny Wolter, West Toledo Branch Lib., OH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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