Prairie Home Cooking: 400 Recipes that Celebrate the Bountiful Harvests, Creative Cooks, and Comforting Foods of the American Heartland (America Cooks)

If Ma and Pa Ingalls had expanded their Little House enough to welcome overnight guests, Judith M. Fertig's Prairie Home Cooking would be the cookbook most often featured on the bed and breakfast menu. There'd be a basket of Tom's Northern Plains Rhubarb Muffins, to be sure. And probably a St. Louis Gooey Butter Coffee Cake for those who just can't decide. Then Featherweight Whole Wheat Pancakes with Chokecherry Syrup, or Gingerbread Waffles with Pear Sauce, followed by a Hungarian Omelette, Tomato and Zucchini Scrambled Eggs, Herbed Sausage Patties, Swedish Potato Sausages, a side of fried Goetta, and coffee. And that, by golly, is only breakfast.

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