Prairie recipes and kitchen antiques

by Wilma Kurtis

Book by Kurtis, Wilma

Genres: Cookbooks

143 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Fay Risner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fun read about dishes prepared on the prairie in fireplaces and other dishes fixed with what the cooks had on hand. Sprinkled among the recipes were pictures and descriptions of kitchen gadgets used in that period. I found this book very interesting.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is utter horseshit. It's no different than any other ladies' society cookbook that you can find in any town in the US from all throughout the 20th century. All the recipes were submitted by Wilma Kurtis' church buddies and have no connection to pioneer recipes at all--at least I seriously doubt the Ingalls' were carrying around boxes of Kellogg's All-Bran, which by the way was first sold in 1916.

The connection to Little House on the Prairie is such a despicable, disingenuous cash grab that, if not for the fact that Kurtis owned the site and made sure to let the reader know every few pages, no one would ever have bought this book at all. I regret that I spent $1.50 on it.

It could have been awesome, if Kurtis had wanted to spend even the slightest amount of effort doing actual research and had been even slightly interested in being honest about how she presented it. Instead we just have generic 70s crappy church lady recipes and photos of old timey stuff, no doubt from the same church ladies' collections of junk they had lying around their houses. Bonus points for the random bits of racist gobbledygook peppered throughout.