Recipes and food photography from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s assembled with humorous commentary.

Presents photographs, illustrations, food ads, recipes, and culinary miscellany from the 1950s and 1960s with commentary on an array of the "best of the worst" dishes from the period.

From satirist Lileks comes a hilarious collection of questionable childcare tips from a bygone era.

For food that's as beautiful as any photograph - and tastes every bit as good as it looks. 'A great book, full of unsurprisingly wonderful photographs... even the most lumbering home cooks can create beautiful dishes' The Sunday Times Magazine 'This ravishing book is a tribute to the passion, flair and creativity with which Frankie transforms my piles of recipes, bringing their 3D tapestry to life so brilliantly and palpably in my books. Revealing her tricks and tips, with delicious, achievable recipes, her book is as beautifully written as it is to behold' Michel Roux, O.B.E. It's true that 'we eat with our eyes'. This beautiful, clever book provides a fantastic toolkit straight from the world of professional food styling, and it promises to change the way you cook for ever. The recipes in The New Art of Cooking include all the little preparation, cooking and serving details that make a difference to the end result: without even trying you'll pick up tips that can be applied to the rest of your repertoire. Recipes include beetroot soup with cream clouds; sticky baked feta with radicchio cups; bittersweet salad with whipped goat's cheese; pork belly roast with shaken rhubarb; fancy puff-pastry fish pie; chocolate mousse with crushed praline; salted caramel wedding cake; and strawberries and cream ice lollies. From simple workday suppers to indulgent feasts for friends and family, this is an approach that will make your cooking look better than ever and taste wonderful too.

Recently, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardbacks was a book called At Home on the Range, written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. As Gilbert writes in her Foreword: 'I jumped up and dashed through the house to find my husband, so I could read parts of it to him: Listen to this! The humor! The insight! The sophistication! Then I followed him around the kitchen while he was making our dinner (lamb shanks), and I continued reading aloud as we ate... By the end of the night there were three of us sitting at that table. Gima had come to join us, and she was wonderful, and I was in love.' The cookbook was far ahead of its time. In it, Potter espouses the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish and German), derides preservatives and culinary shortcuts and generally celebrates a devotion to epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious, she says, they must be 'devoured in a silence almost devout'. Part scholar and part crusader for a more open food conversation than currently existed, it's not hard to see where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited both her love of food and her warm, infectious prose. At Home on the Range is a fascinating, humorous and useful cookbook from the past that is essential for the present day.

Banana Meatloaf Tomato Soup Cake, and Spam Smoothies -- borderline tummy-turners to downright doubtful -- Retro Food Fiascos is a showcase of culinary curiosities from some of America's favorite magazines, cookbooks, and food companies. Actual recipes and images of some of the most claring dishes to ever leave the kitchen combine with commentary and quips to pay homage to those foods we'd rather forget. In the name of nutrition and creative cooking, the marketing and recipe writers of the 1950s cooked up some very suspicious combinations. Innovations in food processing and new products tempted everyone from the amateur cook to the professional chef to play with their food. And the results? We'll let you be the judge. Book jacket.

When people think of Russian food, they generally think either of the opulent luxury of the tsarist aristocracy or of post-Soviet elites, signified above all by caviar, or on the other hand of poverty and hunger—of cabbage and potatoes and porridge. Both of these visions have a basis in reality, but both are incomplete. The history of food and drink in Russia includes fasts and feasts, scarcity and, for some, at least, abundance. It includes dishes that came out of the northern, forested regions and ones that incorporate foods from the wider Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union. Cabbage and Caviar places Russian food and drink in the context of Russian history and shows off the incredible (and largely unknown) variety of Russian food.