Cooking From Quilt Country: Hearty Recipes from Amish and Mennonite Kitchens

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Description: When was the last time you had velvety-rich homemade ice cream fresh from a hand-cranked freezer? Or savored the aroma of a soul-warming soup simmering on a wood-burning stove, or the fragrance of a steaming pie, brimming with the season's freshest fruits, cooling on a windowsill? Such innocent culinary pleasures are little more than memories for most of us. 

But to the Amish and Mennonites of northern Indiana, such hearty, wholesome fare is as much a part of life as the region's exceptional tradition of quilting. 

The basis of a thirteen-part cooking series on national PBS stations, Cooking from Quilt Country is provincial country cooking at its best. Marcia Adams spent more than a year among the Amish and Mennonites, who opened their kitchens -- and their hearts -- to her. She discovered a way of cooking that has changed little over the decades. Based on this bountiful heartland region's superb fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains, with culinary influences from Europe, the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the rural Midwest, it is a unique folk cuisine linked to the land and the rhythm of the seasons. 

Many of the nearly 200 recipes were handed down orally from one generation of farm cooks to the next and are recorded here for the first time. Others -- those Marcia Adams calls "attic receipts" -- she found pressed between the leaves of old books or in dusty trunks, written in faded script and nearly forgotten by contemporary cooks. 

Each one is sure to awaken memories: Dandelion Greens with Hot Bacon Dressing and Rhubarb Dumplings signal the first stirrings of spring; Country Fair Barbecue Sandwiches and Cherry Cobbler recall sultry summer days spent outdoors; fall is heralded by Roast Duck with Sauerkraut and Apple Dressing and jars of preserves of all descriptions; while Escalloped Oysters and Steamed Christmas Pudding are pleasant reminders of the joyful holiday season's approach.  

Cooking from Quilt Country also offers best-loved Amish specialties, including Fried Cornmeal Mush with Tomato Gravy, Whoopie Pies, Tomato Fritters, Onion Rivel Soup, and more than fifty glorious desserts from Elderberry Pie and Chocolate Fudge Pudding to Blueberry Upside-Down Cake and Old-Fashioned Apple Dumplings. 

With dozens of spectacular photos of the Amish and Mennonites at work and in repose, Cooking from Quilt Country is an extraordinary evocation of a nearly vanished way of life. 

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Condition: Dust jacket has small tear/lifted paper. Further good condition.