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At Home on the Range

by Margaret Yardley Potter

Other authors: Elizabeth Gilbert (Introduction)

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993271,909 (4.09)12
Cooking & Food. History. Nonfiction. HTML:Recently, while moving into a new house, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardcovers was a book called At Home on the Range (or, How To Make Friends with Your Stove) by Gilbert's great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. Having only been peripherally aware of the volume, Gilbert dug in with some curiosity, and soon found that she had stumbled upon a book far ahead of its time. In her workaday cookbook, Potter espoused the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish, and German), derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated a devotion to seeking out new epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and during World War II she cajoles local poultry farmers into saving buckets of coxcombs for her so she can try to cook them in the French manner. She takes trips to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious, she says, they must be "devoured in a silence almost devout." Part scholarâ??she includes a great recipe from 1848 for boiled sheep headâ??and part crusader for a more open food conversation than currently existed, it's not hard to see from where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited both her love of food, and her warm, infectious prose.

Featuring a comprehensive and moving introduction from Potter's great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Gilbert, At Home on the Range is an eminently usable and humorous cookbook. But it's also more than that: it's an heirloom, an into-the-wee-hours dinner with relatives and ancestors, a perfect gift for anybody with a stove or a m
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Showing 3 of 3
Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for Eat, Pray, Love, republished her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter's cookbook with a foreward and ten favorite recipes formatted to conform to today's recipe standards. The book includes advice on entertaining, cooking tips, and much more. She intersperses humor along the way. The author seemed to go out of her way to use less popular ingredients such as eel, tripe, kidneys, and such. While I've seen recipes for these in other cookbooks from the era, I usually find more things I consider palatable than in this collection. I think a collection from my own ancestors might look very different. I'm certain regional availability influenced the items in Mrs. Potter's cookbook as the food grown on the farm would have influenced the foods my ancestors prepared and ate. It got old reading the recipes in the original in-line format. I think Ms. Gilbert could have done everyone a favor by updating not just ten recipes but all of them, making it less of a reprint and more of an updated for today's reader edition. ( )
  thornton37814 | Oct 5, 2021 |
Perhaps the best book on successful strategies for entertaining I've ever read. Many seem not to like it because the recipes are provided in paragraph form, but they are easily followed. In any event, the value of the book, in my opinion, is that it encourages the host to think strategically about what matters in feeding and entertaining guests, not in terms of lists of ingredients. The tone is bright and breezy, altogether a delightful read. ( )
  BasilBlue | Aug 28, 2012 |
Apparently a 'one-book wonder', this author has given not just cooking tips, but also entertaining and parenting, housekeeping and other helps. Dust jacket lists her other many accomplishments.
  cookebooks | Feb 3, 2008 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Margaret Yardley Potterprimary authorall editionscalculated
Gilbert, ElizabethIntroductionsecondary authorall editionsconfirmed
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Cooking & Food. History. Nonfiction. HTML:Recently, while moving into a new house, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardcovers was a book called At Home on the Range (or, How To Make Friends with Your Stove) by Gilbert's great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. Having only been peripherally aware of the volume, Gilbert dug in with some curiosity, and soon found that she had stumbled upon a book far ahead of its time. In her workaday cookbook, Potter espoused the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish, and German), derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated a devotion to seeking out new epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and during World War II she cajoles local poultry farmers into saving buckets of coxcombs for her so she can try to cook them in the French manner. She takes trips to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious, she says, they must be "devoured in a silence almost devout." Part scholarâ??she includes a great recipe from 1848 for boiled sheep headâ??and part crusader for a more open food conversation than currently existed, it's not hard to see from where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited both her love of food, and her warm, infectious prose.

Featuring a comprehensive and moving introduction from Potter's great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Gilbert, At Home on the Range is an eminently usable and humorous cookbook. But it's also more than that: it's an heirloom, an into-the-wee-hours dinner with relatives and ancestors, a perfect gift for anybody with a stove or a m

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