Jodi Evert

This American Girl, 18-recipe theme cookbook is historically accurate, thoroughly researched, and well documented. Evert ties the information and recipes to events in the "Addy" books (Pleasant), which revolve around a girl who, with her mother, escaped from slavery. Breakfast dishes include grits, pork sausage and gravy, buttermilk biscuits (made with lard), fried apples, and scrambled eggs. Recipes are well illustrated with full-color drawings and photographs and methods are clearly show more described. Dinners are heavy on bacon and fried foods. Addy's favorites, such as chicken shortcake, collard greens, cornbread, potato salad, lemonade, peach cobbler, pound cake, and shortbread are included. Every page includes a factoid from the time period, augmented by archival black-and-white photographs. Descriptions of an Emancipation Celebration and a Juneteenth Party appear at the end of the book, along with suggested games, foods, table settings, clothing, decorations, and music. This is in no way a heart-healthy offering, but it is a faithful description of dishes of the late 1800s and a wonderful asset to historical cooking sections show less

I always groan anymore when my daughter pulls something like this out. As a child, I loved to do projects from books like this, and I still enjoy reading the historical sidebars. But assembling all the materials, and helping her do it (she's 6, so there's a bit of help involved) seems like such a Sisyphean task. Still, it's only really a few hours, and your child will enjoy the project a lot. And who doesn't want a paperweight with an ocean scene inside? You don't have to answer that. Bottom show more line - your kid will enjoy doing the crafts. And they might learn something about history too. show less

Though this is definitely a children's book, the recipes are still good. I especially like the potato salad; it's very simple, but everyone I've made it for has enjoyed it.

The book is clearly designed for parents and children to work through together, so it could provide some good opportunities for parent/child interaction. The little factoids are also rather interesting, and help add context to food from another time period. And of course, this is an especially fun book for anyone who show more follows the American Girl books or who has one of the dolls. show less

This craft book is loaded with history from Molly's time- WWII. It focuses on how war shortages made people think creatively in new ways. Every three or four crafts is introduced with a section about why that craft was done at that period in history. The crafts have clear directions to make them easy to make.