Wild Bounty Cookbook or Cleoras Kitchens

Wild Bounty Cookbook: Simple & Savory Game Cooking

Author: Jim Casada

This is truly a one-of-a-kind game cookbook. What will strike you first is its beauty, from the stunning food photography to outdoor pictures celebrating the game and the hunt. And the 237 simple recipes are all absolutely delicious. There’s not a lot of fuss here, just effective cooking methods to bring out the best in the food—which is something game enthusiasts are sure to appreciate. Entire chapters are devoted to venison; wild turkey; upland birds; upland game; waterfowl; soups, stews, and chili; and “nature’s garden.” There are even salads and desserts using freshly gathered nuts and fruit! From Shrimp-Stuffed Tenderloin to Goose Breast in Wine, you’ll always have plenty of new and exciting ways to prepare your bounty.

Interesting book: One Cake One Hundred Desserts or Drizzle of Honey

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

Author: Cleora Butler

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 by Cleora Butler. Why? "Because, " Ms. Haber said, "it expresses, through food, joy . . . you have the connection of food being celebratory in truly meaningful ways. Just wonderful stuff."
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 -- possum grape wine, mother's hickory nut cake, hot water cornbread, and burnt sugar ice cream -- 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, to duckling pati and pine nut pilaf. Through stories, menus, and recipes, Cleora recreates the flavor of her own remarkable history -- and ours.

Publishers Weekly

Although stylistically unsophisticated, this memoir serves up a valid lesson on the American black experience in the South and charts the changes in American culinary tastes throughout this century. Proficient in Southern specialties like burnt-sugar ice cream and possum grape wine, the versatile Butler borrows from other cultures (croissants, blintzes) and continually updates her menus (wheat-germ stuffed tomatoes and white chocolate mousse in baked almond cups with strawberry sauce debut in the later years). Born into a family of professional cooks, she reminisces on her mother's hickory nut cake and grandfather's sausage. Tidbits on the history of kitchen staples like graham crackers and food processors are sprinkled throughout. With over 300 relatively simple and inexpensive recipes well organized into decades, the handsome book is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of kitchenware, some of them antiques. The author died recently at age 84. (April)