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.

Culinary Landmarks is a definitive history and bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from the beginning, when La cuisinière bourgeoise was published in Quebec City in 1825, to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of more than ten years Elizabeth Driver researched every cookbook published within the borders of present-day Canada, whether a locally authored text or a Canadian edition of a foreign work. Every type of recipe collection is included, from trade publishers' bestsellers and advertising cookbooks, to home economics textbooks and fund-raisers from church women's groups. The entries for over 2,200 individual titles are arranged chronologically by their province or territory of publication, revealing cooking and dining customs in each part of the country over 125 years. Full bibliographical descriptions of first and subsequent editions are augmented by author biographies and corporate histories of the food producers and kitchen-equipment manufacturers, who often published the books. Driver's excellent general introduction sets out the evolution of the cookbook genre in Canada, while brief introductions for each province identify regional differences in developments and trends. Four indexes and a 'Chronology of Canadian Cookbook History' provide other points of access to the wealth of material in this impressive reference book.

From the first edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to the latest works by today's celebrity chefs, cookbooks reflect more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a perceptive and piquant analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly uncovering the cultural assumptions and anxieties—particularly about women and domesticity—they contain. Neuhaus's in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers—mainly white, middle-class women—into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken's 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cook Book, attests to the limitations of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of bachelor cookbooks aimed at "the man in the kitchen" and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities. Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America.