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Colonial Virginia's Cooking Dynasty * Katherine E. Harbury * Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004 * xx, 479 pp. * $59.95
In a book that has appeal for both popular and academic audiences, Katherine E. Harbury presents two manuscript recipe compilations created by women of the Randolph family that document the foodways of elite Virginians in the early eighteenth century. Colonial Virginias Cooking Dynasty is organized into three parts. Harbury begins by evaluating the social and cultural context in which the recipe books were created. The second section of the book evaluates the ingredients and preparations documented in the recipes with an eye toward explaining change over time in colonial Virginia foodways. The third and largest section of the book presents transcriptions of the two manuscript volumes. The book also contains two different indexes-one for the recipes and ingredients in part three and another for parts one and two-along with an extensive bibliography.
According to Harbury, the anonymous author of the earlier volume, "Unidentified cookbook, c. 1700," documents a traditional English approach to cooking. Her...