Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage: Two Hundred Years of Southern Cuisine and Culture

A Southern historian combs through Kentucky cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth to reveal a fascinating cultural narrative.

In Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage, John van Willigen explores the Bluegrass State's cultural and culinary history, through the rich material found in regional cookbooks. He begins in 1839, with Lettice Bryan's The Kentucky Housewife, which includes pre-Civil War recipes intended for use by a household staff instead of an individual cook, along...