For cooks who want to experience a link to culinary history,
Hearthside Cooking is a treasure trove of early American
delights. First published in 1986, it has become a standard guide
for museum interpreters and guides, culinary historians, historical
re-enactors, campers, scouts, and home cooks interested in foodways
and experimenting with new recipes and techniques.
Hearthside Cooking contains recipes for more than 250
historic dishes, including breads, soups, entrees, cakes, custards,
sauces, and more. For each dish, Nancy Carter Crump provides two
sets of instructions, so dishes can be prepared over the open fire
or using modern kitchen appliances. For novice hearthside cooks,
Crump offers specific tips for proper hearth cooking, including
fire construction, safety, tools, utensils, and methods.
More than just a cookbook,
Hearthside Cooking also includes
information about the men and women who wrote the original recipes,
which Crump discovered by scouring old Virginia cookbooks,
hand-written receipt books, and other primary sources in archival
collections. With this new edition, Crump includes additional
information on African American foodways, how the Civil War
affected traditional southern food customs, and the
late-nineteenth-century transition from hearth to stove cooking.
Hearthside Cooking offers twenty-first-century cooks an
enjoyable, informative resource for traditional cooking.