Food from an American Farm - Hardcover

Combining reminiscences with recipes, caterer and teacher Sarlin's book may please readers more than diners. The author evokes her childhood on a Minnesota farm in detail and with vitality; would that her foods matched her prose in freshness and originality. For example, the nuts used in "Mom's Nut Crust" are not the butternuts or hickory nuts indigenous to the Upper Midwest, but common red-skinned peanuts. A lineup of sandwich fillings includes recipes for Velveeta with mustard and dill pickles, bologna chopped with mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs, and a full page on grilled sandwiches made with cheese or meat. No fewer than seven pages cover basic beverages, from sassafras tea to brewed coffee to chocolate milk. Far more intriguing are the recipes coaxed out from cryptic directions left by Sarlin's grandmother. From a few scrawled notes about sugar, sour cream, butter, eggs and soda, mixed "not very stiff," Sarlin and her mother resurrected a scrumptiously tender sugar cookie. As befits a Midwestern farm family, many of the dishes are fried, creamed, buttered and otherwise made rich to silence the appetites of workers who started their days at 4 a.m. Calorie-counters, beware. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Vegetables gussied up with butter, cream, and lard; oodles and oodles of cookies, cakes, and pies (``Grams'' baked pie almost every day of her married life); main dishes of home-butchered beef, ham, and pork, and kitchen-hatched chickens: This diet re-created from the author's and her mother's childhoods on a Minnesota dairy farm must violate most of the Surgeon General's guidelines for today's more sedentary population; but its genuine recipe relics--a few dreadful but most good country fare--are well worth trying on occasion. And the book, with its family photos, memories of family- farm operations, and contextual notes for every family recipe, caters to the current nostalgic mood. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.