Food from the Heartland: The Cooking of America's Midwest

Rating:
Summary: Simple and fabulously tasty!
Review: You know how you remember the food of your childhood and think, it couldn't possibly taste that good today? This book is proof that it can. I have to admit, after 20 years on the East Coast, I'd forgotten there even was such a thing as Midwestern cuisine. Then I started flipped the pages, and was hit with a wave of nostaglia. I got images of pancake suppers at the Kiwanas, picking wild grapes for jam, real coffee cakes with brown sugar bubbling hot from the oven, mac and cheese recipes that unabashedly call for one pound of cheese for every pound of noodles.

Midwestern cooking isn't boring, I realized, but simple. Most recipes have only five or six ingredients -- it's the skill of the cooking and the freshness of the ingredients that counts.

If you get the book, try the recipe for Dutch letters from Yaarsma's Bakery in Pella Iowa. I thought I just remembered it as good because of happy childhood memories of walking with my cousins through that leafy, lovely old town, our shorts pockets full of change to spend at the two rival bakeries. But no, it really is that good. Nothing I had in in the Netherlands recently (and I sampled religiously) even comes close.