Synopsis
Discusses the everyday life, cooking methods, common foods, and hardships and celebrations during the Gold Rush in California. Includes recipes.
Children's Literature
Elementary school-age boys must be interested in cooking, for Capstone Press has brought forth under the Blue Earth Books imprint a series called "Exploring History through Simple Recipes." This slim, 32-page book presents photographs and drawings of the forty-niners interspersed with a straightforward text that gives a clear and accurate idea of the hardships endured by our forebears who opened the west. The accompanying recipes are indeed simple and illustrate the basic fare that kept forty-niners going in those parlous days. They include some duds, like Sea Biscuits, whose recipe is almost identical to the library glue we once made out of flour and water in grammar school, but there's the more promising Hang Town Fry and Blueberry Peach Hand Pies. The tone is sober and factual, the sentences determinedly simple, too. Photographs, drawings and anecdotes in sidebars nicely complement the text, and a list of cooking equipment, a metric conversion guide and ten kitchen safety rules come first in this no-nonsense book. 2001, Blue Earth Books, $22.60. Ages 6 to 12. Reviewer: Nancy Tilly