This eighteenth century kitchen reference is the first cookbook published in the U.S. with recipes using local ingredients for American cooks. Named by the Library of Congress as one of the eighty-eight “Books That Shaped America,” American Cookery was the first cookbook by an American author published in the United States. Until its publication, cookbooks used by American colonists were British. As author Amelia Simmons states, the recipes here were “adapted to this country,” reflecting the fact that American cooks had learned to prepare meals using ingredients found in North America. This cookbook reveals the rich variety of food colonial Americans used, their tastes, cooking and eating habits, and even their rich, down-to-earth language. Bringing together English cooking methods with truly American products, American Cookery contains the first known printed recipes substituting American maize for English oats; the recipe for Johnny Cake is the first printed version using cornmeal; and there is also the first known recipe for turkey. Another innovation was Simmons’s use of pearlash—a staple in colonial households as a leavening agent in dough, which eventually led to the development of modern baking powders. A culinary classic, American Cookery is a landmark in the history of American cooking. “Thus, twenty years after the political upheaval of the American Revolution of 1776, a second revolution—a culinary revolution—occurred with the publication of a cookbook by an American for Americans.” —Jan Longone, curator of American Culinary History, University of Michigan This facsimile edition of Amelia Simmons's American Cookery was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, founded in 1812.

American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, is the first known cookbook written by an American. It teaches how to prepare fish, poultry, vegetables, as well as the making of pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, preserves and all kinds of cakes.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

The classic, must-have American cookbook from one of our greatest authorities on food. James Beard was the "dean of American cookery" (New York Times), and he put practically everything he learned about cooking into this single magnificent--now classic--cookbook. JAMES BEARD'S AMERICAN COOKERY includes more than fifteen hundred of his favorite and most successful recipes, as well as advice on dozens of cooking questions, from choosing meats and vegetables to preserving fruit and making real cheeseburgers. A celebration of the roots of cooking in the American style, this repackaged edition features the original text and color illustrations, and a new foreword by Tom Colicchio. Like Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Joy of Cooking, it is a standard reference no kitchen is complete without.

First published in England, this kitchen reference became available to colonial American housewives when it was printed in Williamsburg, Virginia is 1742. Originally published in London in 1727, The Compleat Housewife was the first cookbook printed in the United States. William Parks, a Virginia printer, printed and sold the cookbook believing there would be a strong market for it among Virginia housewives who wanted to keep up with the latest London fashions—the book was a best-seller there. Parks did make some attempt to Americanize it, deleting certain recipes “the ingredients or material for which are not to be had in this country,” but for the most part, the book was not adjusted to American kitchens. Even so, it became the first cookery best seller in the New World, and Parks’s major book publication. Author Eliza Smith described her book on the title page as “Being a collection of several hundred approved receipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz. drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such public-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.” The recipes are easy to understand and cover everything from 50 recipes for pickling everything from nasturtium buds to pigeons to “lifting a swan, breaking a deer, and splating a pike,” indicating the importance of understanding how to prepare English game. The book also includes diagrams for positioning serving dishes to create an attractive table display.

Exact reproduction of the first American-written cookbook published in the United States. Authentic recipes for colonial favorites — pumpkin pudding, winter squash pudding, spruce beer, Indian slapjacks, and more.