SQUARE MEALS

Rating:
Summary: Tasty, fun and educational!
Review: Absolutely one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, Square Meals is fun to read and the recipes are delicious. Jane and Michael Stern clearly love food, love fun and love our culinary history. Several of my best dependable recipes are in these pages - Mom's Best Pot Roast, Perfect Mashed Potatoes, and Mary Jane's Rice Pudding with Cream. (I can't quite bring myself to prepare "Undescended Twinkies", however.) As a cookbook collector and an avid cook, I can tell you that these recipes stand the test of time. Long after truffle oil and wasabi mashed yams have lost their appeal, you will still pine for Deep Dish Apple Pie and the memories it conjures. And I hope your copy, like mine, is inscribed "from your sweet-lovin' daddy."

Rating:
Summary: Tasty, fun and educational!
Review: Absolutely one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, Square Meals is fun to read and the recipes are delicious. Jane and Michael Stern clearly love food, love fun and love our culinary history. Several of my best dependable recipes are in these pages - Mom's Best Pot Roast, Perfect Mashed Potatoes, and Mary Jane's Rice Pudding with Cream. (I can't quite bring myself to prepare "Undescended Twinkies", however.) As a cookbook collector and an avid cook, I can tell you that these recipes stand the test of time. Long after truffle oil and wasabi mashed yams have lost their appeal, you will still pine for Deep Dish Apple Pie and the memories it conjures. And I hope your copy, like mine, is inscribed "from your sweet-lovin' daddy."

Rating:
Summary: Take Comfort in Comfort Foods!
Review: I was in the mood to read the other day but nothing seemed to strike my fancy when I spied my well-thumbed copy of SQUARE MEALS. This is not just a cookbook, but a history of food and culture that takes us back to the white-gloved "ladies who lunch" of the 1940's to the suburbanites of the 50's and 60's. The recipes are wonderfully familiar with pot roast, mac and cheese, and chicken noodle soup taking center stage. These are foods your grandmother cooked and there isn't a bean sprout in sight! Not only are the recipes great the stories and the history make for wonderfully satisfying reading. I would urge anyone with a love of food and a passion for kitchy history to get this and add it to their library.

Rating:
Summary: Take Comfort in Comfort Foods!
Review: I was in the mood to read the other day but nothing seemed to strike my fancy when I spied my well-thumbed copy of SQUARE MEALS. This is not just a cookbook, but a history of food and culture that takes us back to the white-gloved "ladies who lunch" of the 1940's to the suburbanites of the 50's and 60's. The recipes are wonderfully familiar with pot roast, mac and cheese, and chicken noodle soup taking center stage. These are foods your grandmother cooked and there isn't a bean sprout in sight! Not only are the recipes great the stories and the history make for wonderfully satisfying reading. I would urge anyone with a love of food and a passion for kitchy history to get this and add it to their library.

Rating:
Summary: What a tragedy that this is out of print!!
Review: There are cooking cookbooks and reading cookbooks, and this is my all-time favorite reading cookbook. This is the kind of cookbook that it's fun to curl up with on a cold night, just to soak in all that good comfort food. Of course, there are many wonderful cookable recipes - the Cincinnati Chili, for example, is absolutely outstanding, and authentic. The roast pork with sinner stuffing is also superb. This is the antithesis to 90's low-fat nouvelle cuisine and other overly fussy fare. Fun illustrations, too.