Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent recipes for any time of the year
Comment: This book has excellent recipes; not just for the holidays but all year round. Love it!! I even ordered some more of Louise Stolzfus' cookbooks
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Favorite
Comment: This cookbook is hands down my favorite cookbook of all time, it is jammed
with recipes, little stories and great variety, it isn't your everyday
cookbook. I have given this cookbook as a gift many times. Try it you
WILL like it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Treasure Chest of Traditional, Easy Recipes.
Comment: `A Quilter's Christmas Cookbook' by `Good Books' (in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) editors Louise Stoltzfus and Dawn J. Ranck is a genuine bargain for traditional recipe collectors who keep their magazine cutouts in little `tin' filing cans designed for holding 3" by 5" index cards. I know this because this is exactly how my mother keeps her recipes, and so many of the recipes in this book are the very same she has in her little gray can.
For a list price of a mere $13.95, we get 330 pages of recipes, stuffed to almost always three to a page, giving us close to 900 very traditional holiday recipes. A quick look at the title, publisher, and the names of the editors may lead one to think that this book is all about Pennsylvania Dutch recipes, but it is not. The book is a collection of recipes from quilting hobbyists from all over the country. And, the traditional Amish and Mennonite centers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State are in the distinct minority, While there are a fairly large number of contributions from small towns in southeastern Pennsylvania (Punxsutawney, PA seems to have an inordinately large number of contributors), my hunch is that there is at least one recipe here from every state in the Union, and some from Canada.
In spite of the geographical diversity, there is a great commonality in the style of recipes. Not only do most of them hint of hundreds of little gray boxes from around the country, there is also a strong spirit of pre-Julia Child 1950s style of cooking epitomized by Poppy Cannon, of `Can Opener Gourmet' and other books in that spirit. Two of the symptoms of this style are the use of margarine in place of butter and the heavy use of packaged gelatins (`Jell-O'). The fact that these recipes come from all over the country makes this uniformity even more dramatic. The third symptom is a heavy use of canned goods, especially canned soups, vegetables, and fruits.
As simple as almost all these recipes appear to the casual browser, many are simply too simple. For example, there is virtually never any statement of what size of egg to use in the recipe (The editors could not make such a statement, as there was no way they could know if our 900 contributors all used the same size egg.) Similarly, few recipes specify salted or unsalted butter, in the few cases where butter is used. There are also very few baking recipes that give instructions on how to determine that the baked goods are `done'. I see one recipe with such an instruction, but most recipes on either side of this example have none. So, these are distinctly NOT the kind of recipes you will find in `Gourmet', `Bon Appetit', or even `Martha Stewart Living'. I suspect that you will also not find recipes of this type in `Good Housekeeping', as all our major culinary media have been thoroughly steeped in the `fresh, fresh, fresh' and `local ingredients' mantras of Alice Waters and Deborah Madison.
All this suggests that the editors, like the editors of church and social group cookbooks all tend to assume that their readers already know how to cook well, and are much more interested in the variety in dish than they are about honing their already quite satisfactory cooking skills.
In a brief lapse of focus, I noticed that there seemed to be a rather large number of recipes using cranberries. When I came to my senses, I realized that this is, after all, a book of Christmas recipes, and the cranberry comes into season late in the year, just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this doesn't explain the four-(4) rhubarb recipes, when rhubarb is a traditional spring and early summer speciality.
I don't want to leave this book without stating that for a very large cookbook audience, this book is exactly what they are looking for. An enormous collection of relatively easy recipes providing excellent ideas for what to make in the weeks surrounding Christmas. So what if there is no `bouche de Noel' recipe which requires a day to make and the patience of a saint, not to mention the skills of a journeyman pastry chef. And, this book is inexpensive enough and small enough so that it will sit alongside the household's copy of `The Joy of Cooking' without taking too many family resources.
I confess there is just a bit of the insider's interest in the book, as each recipe's headnote includes the name of the quilting pattern the contributor is making when they submitted their recipe. I look at these names and draw a complete blank, although I suspect that among the quilting community, they are as well known as `Extra Virgin', `Colcannon', and `Ratatouille' are to us foodies. If I were to offer any suggestion to the editors, it would be to include a picture of each quilt, or at least some distinctive part of each quilt in the headnote, but then, this would probably double the price of the book.
Neither `Gourmet' nor `Pennsylvania Dutch', but an immense collection for Christmas cooking.The huge chapter on Christmas cookies and the Christmas breakfast dishes alone make this book worth getting.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great collection of recipes!
Comment: Whether you are a quilter or not, you will love this cookbook.
The variety and quality of recipes is amazing...I probably have 70 cookbooks, but this is one that I can rely on regularly for having good recipes that are straight-forward, easy to follow, and (best of all!) delicious to eat. So many friends have asked for recipes that originated from this cookbook that, when they see the great collection, they ended up buying this cookbook, too!
Customer Rating:
Summary: And it's not just for Christmas!!
Comment: My favorite holiday cookbook, but also fabulous for good company recipes, potluck dinners or when you just want something a little special for those you love at home. Recipes from appetizers to desserts. Comfort food and ethnic specialities! A to Z!!I also love reading the notes in the corners with memories of Christmas' past and enjoy seeing the regional specialties from different parts of the country. It is also interesting to see what kind of quilts patterns are being made throughout the states and that this wonderful artform is being kept alive. A must have for anyone who loves Louise Stoltzfus' compilation cookbooks! Or anyone who loves good old fashioned good food!
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