Mrs. Wilkes' Boardinghouse Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from Her Savannah Table

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Summary: YUMMMMMMMMMMM!!
Review: This is the best money I have ever spent! The most delicious and easy recipes I have ever seen. I have hundreds of cookbooks and this is the one that stays out all the time. I cannot recommend this one enough. This lady can cook!!!!! You cannot go wrong with this one!

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Summary: Savannah Lore and Recipes. Good Look and Read
Review: `Mrs. Wilkes' Boardinghouse Cookbook' is a collection of recipes attributed to Sema Wilkes of dishes served at her famous Savannah boarding house (which no longer takes in boarders). The recipes are augmented by a series of articles on the history of the Wilkes family and the restaurant by John T. Edge, a widely and favorably recognized writer on southern culinary matters.

The most interesting aspect of the recipes in this book is that they are as much an interest as an historical record as they are a basis of culinary inspiration. The most interesting books with which to compare this work may be, for example, `Rome, at Home' by Suzanne Dunaway and the books on Sicilian cookery by writer/actor Vincent Schiavelli. The most similar book I have seen is Ms. Sally Ann Robinson's charming little book, `Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way'. A non-culinary comparison may be to a manual on how to do decorative painting in the style of the Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. I say this only to enhance the value you can anticipate from this notable book.

This volume contains recipes for `Comfort Food Central'. Ask a hundred second generation Americans to name their top five favorite dishes and recipes for virtually all these dishes will be in this book. Main dishes include fried chicken, chicken cacciatore, roast beef, beef bourguignonne, meatballs, meatloaf, chop suey, corned beef and cabbage, and chili. This is the typical collection of both classic Southern dishes mixed with Americanizations of famous foreign dishes. All other types of dishes show a similar selection of favorites. The dessert chapter stays just a bit closer to home by featuring primarily cakes, such as pound cake, red velvet cake, carrot cake, and fruitcake and pies (and cobblers) such as lemon meringue pie, sweet potato pie, pecan pie, peach pie, and blackberry pie.

Many of the savory recipes are simply `dump and heat', where the procedure could hardly be any simpler. Recipes for chili and beef bourguignonne which in some hands take on epic dimensions are so simple in this book that you need to look twice to be sure this is the dish being made. This simplicity is achieved in many cases by using one or more classic darlings of 1950's cooking, canned, condensed soup, canned mushrooms, bouillon cubes, French dressing, and bottled mayonnaise. This doesn't mean the results of these recipes are not tasty, it only means the dishes may be a lot different than what you may be expecting. This is definitely not Julia Child's beef bourguignonne. Even such staples of Southern cooking such as fried chicken are done in a highly abbreviated way with no brining and no buttermilk marinade.

Another caution with these recipes is that many have not been scaled down from boarding room proportions to suit a family of four. Still another concern is that like a lot of recipes in `Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way', there is a certain sameness in a lot of recipes. All the potato and macaroni and chicken and egg salads are about the same except for the star ingredient. Again, this doesn't mean they are poor recipes, it just means they all reflect a time when supermarkets didn't have radicchio, fennel, Belgian endive, celery root, and leeks. So, lots of recipes had to depend on celery, onions, and carrots.

Since this oversized book with lots of excellent pictures and really interesting text lists at only $29.95, the quality of these pictures and text and the `archeological' interest of the recipes is more than enough to make this book a worthy addition to your cookbook collection. If you want to make pies, read Nick Malgieri. If you want to bake cakes, read Maida Heatter. If you want to make meatballs, read Marcella Hazan. If you want to make barbecue, read Steve Raichlen. If you want classic Southern cooking, read Edna Lewis. If you want to make beef bourguignonne, for heavens sake, read Julia Child, Tony Bourdain, or Thomas Keller. But, if you want a taste of Savannah boardinghouse cooking, this is your book.

Aside from supporting recipes for preparations such as meringue, sauces, dressings, and piecrusts, there are virtually no cooking instructions here. Even the index fails now and then in that there are prepared ingredients mentioned in some recipes for which there are no entries in the index. So, I have no clue to how to make a `Kitchen Bouquet' mentioned as an ingredient in several recipes. And, I suspect a great part of the quality of the food at Mrs. Wilkes boardinghouse can be attributed to the skill of the staff and to the quality of the ingredients rather than to the excellence of the recipes.

As long as you buy this book for the right reasons, you will not be disappointed.