Prairie Home Cooking: 400 Recipes That Celebrate the Bountiful Harvests, Creative Cooks, and Comforting Foods of the American Heartland - Hardcover

Once you get over to the Amish Frolic, you'll find Orange-Mint Thresher's Drink, Firehouse Tomatoes, Pickled Beets, Baked Macaroni and Cheddar, Scalloped Peaches-and-Cream Corn, Buttermilk-Oatmeal Bread, New Prague Meatloaf, Norwegian Potato Doughnuts, and Old-fashioned Chocolate Cakes with Boiled Frosting. And then there's supper to think about next.

Take the better part of Europe, heavy on the North and the Central, tip it up on one end, and sprinkle liberally across Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, let sit for 100 years of proud cooking, and 400 of the recipes that remain will be found in Prairie Home Cooking.

Anyone connected to a farm somewhere along the line will find this book comforting. Anyone with an abundant backyard garden will love this book for its relishes and canned goods. Anyone who ever wondered about the Midwest is in for a thorough education. And eating is only part of it. Fertig fills her pages with wonderful detail about the places and the people that have made up the American Midwest ever since the first plow broke through prairie sod.--Schuyler Ingle