Zanna Bianca Alla Riscossa/In

One of the neighborhood grandmothers used to tell my mother: "If Bobby wants to eat chocolate cake for breakfast...let him eat the cake...it has all the things that are good for him...eggs, flour, butter, milk, and chocolate!" Not exactly the advice of today, however the ladies of the Kingston Presbyterian Church must have agreed because over half of the 425 recipes in this cookbook are for desserts. Loaded with historic recipes, this cookbook is guaranteed to return you once again to your grandma's kitchen.

To be sure that you get the same results that grandma did you will need to use period ingredients: real butter, cream, and so on, when using these recipes. Otherwise, they will not taste the same and some may not work at all. Old recipes were designed for use with unbleached flour and often will not work with bleached flour because of additives and bleaching agents that cause the flour to act differently. The recipes also may not work properly when you substitute modern ingredients for the use of lard in cooking. Old recipes also used different units of measurement than we do today. Standardized measurements did not appear until 1896. Where teaspoons or tablespoons are mentioned they are the spoons people ate or served with, a cup meant a teacup and a glass or tumbler was a small water glass.

Readers are forewarned of other challenges to preparing these recipes. For instance, often the recipes are simply a list of ingredients without instructions. Cooking times and temperatures are a more modern invention and a recipe like the one for Beaf Loaf tells us to "Bake an hour and a quarter" but is silent as to the oven temperature. On the other hand, the recipe for Oyster Pie says to "bake in a quick oven" without mention to how long to bake the pie. Or, for that matter what a "quick oven" means. Other instructions like "cook until done" or "milk to make a batter" may also challenge readers aspiring to cook like their grandmother and/or great grandmother.

Quite a challenge, but I am sure your grandmother will be there with you helping you recreate history!