A thoughtful, unique cookbook with a cherry on top.
A self-taught baker brings an anonymous Depression-era cookbook up to date, with a history lesson for dessert.
Simpson, a nurse and home baker from Dixie, Georgia, was scouring eBay for old cookbooks when she found a handwritten book of dessert recipes from 1932. A “nail-biting bidding war” and $75 later, the cookbook was hers, but recreating the Bundt cakes, tortes, and cookies in its pages wouldn’t prove to be as simple as just following instructions. The recipes were essentially “lists of ingredients” without the cooking times, oven settings, or precise directions included in modern recipes. The author resolved to painstakingly restore the original recipes in her Florida kitchen, converting vague measurements and directions into more precise numbers. The result is a cookbook full of creative curiosities, from “Potato Cake” to “Seafoam Candy” to “Eggless-Butterless-Milkless Cake.” Each recipe is introduced with a short preamble describing the dessert, and many offer details about the delicate process of learning how to make them in a modern kitchen. Along the way, Simpson notes her surprise at what she’s uncovered—despite what contemporary readers might expect, the original recipe book is scant on pies and heavy on butter and eggs for a cookbook penned at the height of the Great Depression. She provides the reader with a short popular history of the era, as well as background information on the use of lard, woodburning ovens, and Bundt pans. While the economic context might strike some readers as oversimplified, the author is a thoughtful and entertaining historian. Simpson’s modernized instructions are clear and well written, despite some unnecessary repetitions (she repeats across several recipes, for instance, that you can thin an icing by adding more liquid, or thicken it by adding more powdered sugar). Her “tips for better baking” make the work approachable to a wide audience of home bakers (several of the more challenging recipes start with instructions on how to “plan ahead”). This is a charming, intriguing book of desserts in which the author invites readers into her process and on her journey through baking history.
A thoughtful, unique cookbook with a cherry on top.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781953555816
Page Count: 156
Publisher: SPARK Publications
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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