Karen Hess – författare

Martha Washington's recipes: More than five hundred classics dating from the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, are gathered in this family cookbook that captures the essence of early American folk culture. Handed down as a manuscript cookbook for generations, Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery has been annotated by Karen Hess, a noted culinary historian and cook. "Amerian cookery is a tapestry of extraordinary complex design, reflecting out rich and varied ethnic origins, our New World produce, and our frontier history," writes Hess in her introduction. For the historian, she documents early American cookery with prose and photographs of Washington's original manuscript and an appendix detailing extensive primary-source research. For the cook, she explains terms and techniques unfamiliar to the modern kitchen, showing how to make old fashioned recipes the traditional way, such as rose petal vinegar, Oxford Kate's sausages, roast capon with oysters, mince pie, fried pudding, almond butter ginger bread, and apple cider.In paperback for the first time, Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery is both a significant primary resource for historians and the perfect gift for enthusiastic cooks and fans of the culinary arts.

This classic barbeque of our foodways is as valid and as savory today as when it first tickled ribs a generation ago. Based on the superlative authority of John L. Hess, onetime food critic of the New York Times, and Karen Hess, the pioneering historian of cookery, The Taste of America is both a history of American cooking and a history of the advice smiling celebrity cooks have asked Americans to swallow.The Taste of America provoked the cooking experts of the 1970s into spitting rage by pointing out in embarrassing detail that most of them lacked an essential ingredient: expertise. Now "Kool-Aid like Mother used to make" has become "Kool-Aid like Grandmother used to make," and a new generation has been weaned on synthetic food, pathetic snobbery, neurotic health advice, and reconstituted history.This much-needed new edition chars Julia Child ("She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV"), chides food maven Ruth Reichl, and marvels at a convention of food technologists (whose program bore the slogan "Eat your heart out, Mother Nature"). Delectable reading for consumers, reformers, and scholars, this twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of The Taste of America will serve well into the new millennium.