"Mrs. Wakefield's 1881 work is a deceptively simple work of staple recipes for the home cook. Containing such basic recipes as ""Clear Macaroni Soup,"" ""Roux for Thickening All Kinds of Soups, Sauces, Gravies, etc., "" and ""To Bake a Ham,"" the work goes on to more advanced recipes that build upon the more simple ones. Designed to utilize more common ingredients, this work allows the cook to create inexpensive, yet still elegant meals. "

Tim Miller takes us on a fascinating tour of home cooking and eating in America – where it’s been and where it’s going – as well as a vivid accounting of our stubborn unwillingness to give it up all together in the face of easy, processed, and prepared meals.

Consumption and the Literary Cookbook offers readers the first book-length study of literary cookbooks. Imagining the genre more broadly to include narratives laden with recipes, cookbooks based on cultural productions including films, plays, and television series, and cookbooks that reflected and/or shaped cultural and historical narratives, the contributors draw on the tools of literary and cultural studies to closely read a diverse corpus of cookbooks. By focusing on themes of consumption—gastronomical and rhetorical—the sixteen chapters utilize the recipes and the narratives surrounding them as lenses to study identity, society, history, and culture. The chapters in this book reflect the current popularity of foodie culture as they offer entertaining analyses of cookbooks, the stories they tell, and the stories told about them.