Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook

Crescent Dragonwagon's Soup and Bread has kept my family fed in style (with never a complaint from the most finicky of eaters). My local supermarket is decent (but not a gourmet mecca) and I groan when I open a cookbook to find the recipes made entirely of exotic and expensive ingredients. (After all that money and effort, you might as well have gone to the author's restaurant and plonked down your plastic.) Crescent, however, can turn simple ingredients into a feast. I turn to this book when I have "nothing" in the house for dinner and don't have time for a supermarket run. It always amazes me that I can get results like this with a relatively small effort. Her stories of Dairy Hollow House give each dish an "atmosphere." Her Gumbo Zeb recipe is the best gumbo I have ever had, and this is from a girl who spent years in Louisiana drowning in many incredible bowls of it. My husband inadvertedly renamed the recipe when he was raving about the dish and I told him it was by Crescent Dragonwagon. At our house, it's called "Green Dragon" Gumbo. It's brilliant. (Make it and you'll know what I mean.)

Soup. Bread. Muffins. Salad. Yum. This is a book full of great recipes and wonderful lore. I enjoy the quotes and anecdotes almost as much as the food, and this is great food. We enjoy the Hillbilly Many-Bean Soup, the Skillet-Sizzled Buttermilk Cornbread, the Glazed Orange Muffins, the Dairy Hollow House Pasta Salad, the Chicken & Cheese Soup with Green Chiles again and again. Some of these recipes even go with us on vacation. There are great directions for making your own soup stocks, and no, you do not have to live in your kitchen all day to do it. We keep finding interesting recipes we want to try, as well as returning to our favorites time & time again. More than a recipe book, this is a visit with a friend who loves to cook. Enjoy!

This book is as fun to read as it is to cook from. Dragonwagon has a nice colloquial writing style and gives a lot of background on where each recipe comes from, trivia about the Ozarks and the inn she ran with her husband for many years. Although this book does have a few pages focusing on breads and salads, the soup recipes (which make up about 75% of the book) are truly the shining stars here. The recipes are divided into chapters on chicken soups, fish soups, vegetable soups, bean soups, dairy soups, nut soups, and fruit/dessert soups. There is also a chapter devoted entirely to making the ultimate gumbo, and one on a very versatile "diet" soup. The majority of recipes fall into the vegetable/dairy/and bean soup categories - making this book quite suitable for vegetarians or people interested in cutting back on the amount of meat in their diets. She doesn't eat red meat, and you won't find any recipes that call for beef, pork, or lamb... although there are a couple of exceptions. As other reviewers have mentioned, these recipes are all easily adaptable to what vegetables you already have in your refrigerator, though you will probably need to make regular trips to the store to stock up on fresh veggies if you intend to use this book often. The recipes call for lots of ingredients, but you can easily leave some out and still have a great tasting finished product. Many variations are given for each soup and some have ideas for using leftovers. Although she doesn't recommend it, bouillon cubes or canned stock could easily be substituted if you're short on time. However, if you ever wanted to learn how to make a great homemade stock, this is the place for it.The recipes themselves are excellent and I have had fabulous results and many compliments when serving these soups to others. I highly recommend the Mexican-Style The Soup, Greek Navy Bean Soup, and Pea Soup Caraway Adelle. These soups are a wonderful way to save money and eat healthy while still pleasing your tastebuds.The book has a nice design, but if you're looking for fancy photographs or art, you won't find them here.

This cookbook is probably the most-used and best of all in my kitchen, and I have about 50. You don't need to doubt one word of what Ms. D writes, all of these recipes (I've tried almost all of them) are unbelievably delicious. All are dinner-party worthy. I have had the best compliments from guests and hubby for the soups, above any other part of the meal. My only complaint: she's such a purist about fresh ingredients, particularly broth, that I felt really guilty using canned broth. Sorry but I just don't have the time to make fresh chicken broth!! She's right of course, but not everyone can spend all day in the kitchen. This cookbook is EXCELLENT.