The American Heritage Guide to Food and Cooking includes recipes for nearly every dish in the book, including the beloved chicken kielbasa, a hearty meal made with sauerkraut, saucy bacon, and mushrooms.
The book also includes a list of 10,000 ingredients for cooking that include all the essentials for a hearty, delicious meal, like butter, eggs, and milk.
“It’s a book that really does take you on a journey, a journey of discovery about the world,” says James Fetter, a food historian and author of The Cooks Guide to Cooking.
The cookbooks were popular in the 1800s, Fetter says, and there was a great demand for them because of the popularity of the new style of cooking, called the steam-oven method.
Today, steam-grilling is the most popular way to cook, but it wasn’t always so.
When the steam washes over the stove, the oil is still hot, but the steam also heats the food, which creates the right temperature to cook.
“In the past, a cookbook would have been about cooking a meal,” Fetter said.
“This is about cooking for the home.”
The book was originally published in 1874, and it’s still one of the most used cookbooks in the world today.
“There’s so much information in the cookbooks today, and so much that we’ve never learned about,” Fitter says.
“And that’s what makes them so effective.
They’re so specific and so precise about the way you can make something, and you can really feel how the process works.”
The recipes are so detailed that they even contain information on how to make certain types of food.
For example, the cookbook lists the correct proportions of eggs, breadcrumbs, and butter.
“The idea of the book is to make a more precise recipe,” Finner says.
And the way the recipes are arranged helps to guide you.
“We’ve got a table of ingredients, and we can see how they work, how they’re supposed to work, and how they can work together,” Fiter says.
Some of the recipes have the word “cook” in them, which Fetter calls “an indicator of how you’re trying to cook it.”
The Cook’s Book is also available in hardback and paperback.
A new edition of the guide was published in 2016, and Fetter has been working on a new edition for nearly a year.
“I’ve always been interested in books and how we communicate with each other, and I’ve been thinking about the cook’s guide as a way to do that,” he says.
Fetter recently took the new edition to a local college library, where he had a number of students come up to him and ask questions.
The questions were all about how to use the book to help people who want to cook for themselves.
“They’re saying, ‘I want to try this book and it makes it a lot easier for me to cook,’ ” Fetter recalls.
“People have a sense of self-discipline, and that’s great, but there are so many different things that they need to do, and these books can help them out.
It’s just a really powerful way of teaching people how to cook.”
Fetter is also working on an ebook of the entire book.
The American College of Food Technologists, a nonprofit group, is one of many organizations that have signed on to help improve the book.
Fitter is also interested in seeing the book become more widely available in other parts of the world.
“Hopefully, with the new editions, we can spread the word around,” he said.
