Cleora's Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook & Eight Decades of Great American Food Review

Cleora's Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook and Eight Decades of Great American Food

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(More customer reviews)Cleora's Kitchens begins with a freedman's wagon train ride from Texas to Oklahoma for free land and opportunity in what, at the turn of the 20th century, was to be a Black and Indian state and ends with the story of one woman's remarkable life in food. This is no ordinary cookbook. It contains old recipes that could not possibly be found anywhere else and is a joyful history told in food.

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When Barbara Haber, curator of Radcliffe College's 4000-volume cookbook library, was asked by The Boston Globe to name her favorite book in that famous collection, she picked Cleora's Kitchens. Starting with a freedman's wagon ride out of Texas, Cleora Butler takes us from the beaten biscuits of her childhood, baked in a wood-burning stove, to fricasseed quail she later prepared as a caterer. Rich with stories and turn-of-the-century recipes impossible to find - Cleora's Kitchens also provides a glimpse of changing twentieth-century tastes. More than 400 recipes are arranged by the decades in which she first cooked and served them, from grandpa's sausage in the early days to the first avocado anyone in Oklahoma had ever seen. Through stories, menus, and recipes, Cleora recreates the flavor of her own remarkable history - and ours.