Snag Mary At The Farm And Book Of Recipes Compiled During Her Visit Among The Pennsylvania Germans Curated By Edith M. Thomas Distributed As Volume

originally loaded this onto my kindle thinking it was a recipe book I was in for such a surprise! Mary, a young bride or soon to be bride spends time with an older housewife and just follows her throughout the day learning all kinds of things.
I loved how they described puting poetry in the cookbook so you could memorize it, such lovely little ideas are sprinkled all over.
Nice little book on homemaking in preWWI Pennsylvania Dutch country, Includes many recipes. The edition I read was from Project Gutenberg, I've been told that the Kindle edition has some formatting issues, After interviewing a number of old informants, the author, Edith M, Thomas, wove together this factual but fictitious story of Mary Midleton and her visit one summer to the farm of her Aunt Sarah and Uncle John.


At age nineteen, Mary is about to be married and feels the need of learning about "how to keep house, cook, economize and to learn how to get the most profit from life.
" What better school could she have than the Bucks County farm home of her great aunt

and uncle, Aunt Sarah teaches Mary various crafts especially beadwork and rugmaking and reveals the mysteries of cooking in hundreds of pages of authentic and traditional recipes, many accompanied by the stories and lore associated with them.
truncated summary courtesy of Feeding America Housekeeping lore and lectures get a slightly saccharin coating of fiction in this story of sweet, young Mary and her Pennsylvania relations.
About to wed, Mary gives up her job teaching kindergarten and visits Bucks County in order to learn cooking, handicrafts and other housewifely skills from her GreatAunt Sarah.


Along with these lessons, she gets tips on thrift, reads a great deal of sentimental poetry included in the text and travels around the area taking in the scenic views and historic sights, as well as arguing in favor of women's suffrage and setting up a chapter of the Camp Fire Girls.


It's not exactly thrilling reading the storybook section can get a bit prosy Aunt Sarah is inclined to lecture but there's a wealth of information about earlyth century homemaking techniques, including rug making, preserving and cookery, and the recipe section is full of interesting, oldfashioned American and PennsylvaniaDutch/German recipes.
This is a cookbook, but also a story of a young bride to be learning household economics from her aunt.
Hints and useful tips, as well as a plethora of tasty recipes,Edith Matilda Thomas.