Cool Cookbook! (and Amazon Note)

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The simply, but beautifully illustrated cover of Amish Cooking and Canning...there is no information in there about the cover design, I wish there had been....

By Kevin Williams

I have seen a lot of Amish cookbooks in my day, but this cookbook which arrived in my mail today is one of the best I've seen.  In terms of the purity of the Amish recipes, this is just wonderful.  Now, again, I approach this from an anthropological standpoint.  Recipes, as I have said before, are like "time capsules" that capture a community in a freeze-frame as to the hows, whys, etc. I can really mine recipes for a lot of cultural information.  For instance, here is one nugget I found.  There is a popular recipe among the Amish known as "wigglers", but this book, published in 1976, has it spelled weiglers.  Never seen that before.  Could "wigglers" be a variation of some German word? (I tried to do some cursory research and came up empty)  Or perhaps it is simply a misspelling.  I'll have to go through this book more carefully and perhaps I'll get some of my questions answered.

I saw two of these cookbooks available for a penny (yes, a penny) on Amazon, you can grab one here.  There are just some amazingly authentic Amish recipes in here (never seen so many recipes for grape nuts):  spice cakes, double cheese bake, wash day dinner,  potato pie, and so, so, so many more place home remedies. But what makes this book so special is that it is "freeze framing" the very insular Amish community in Buchanan County, Iowa in 1976, so these recipes are inter-generational gems handed down.   And the good news: I'll be sharing some of these recipes with you over the weeks ahead!

As an aside, I have been working on ways to keep Amish365 solvent for a long time.  All websites have had to grapple with how to generate revenue. I do think that I am getting there by pulling together a variety of tools, and here is one: Shop!:)   Amish365.com receives a commission for anything you buy off Amazon if you use this link.  So whether you are buying toothpaste or toilet paper or face cream (I can't see who is buying what, so you're good), this site gets a commission via Amazon's affiliate program.  It's not much, but everything adds up, and if EVERYONE here did that, wow, it would add up!