Reviews for The 1st American Cookie Lady
Library Journal
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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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
