Retro Breakfast: Memorable Meals Morning, Noon, or Night

Despite considering myself a fairly competent cook, I had never been able to master cornbread. I had always been content to leave the work to Jiffy, until I happened upon the recipe in this book, thinking to myself "this just sounds too easy to mess up." Sure enough, it was a success, and therefore worthy of my five stars. Most of the other recipes sound pretty good, too, though the silly recipe for scrapple clearly proves the author has never been to the Delaware Valley.

Sure you could get these recipes off the net - but for those that love books - the graphics add quite a bit of fun! Great for a housewarming present (in combo with some of the other "Retro-" books from this series!

This a is great and fun recipe book if you like breakfast food, however if you love retro and breakfast you will love it, I do.

As easy a target as the classic morning meals in this book can be, what I enjoyed most about "Retro Breakfast" is that the recipes were presented without much comment on the editors' part. So many books of this sort (James Lileks' "Gallery of Regrettable Food" or "Interior Desecrations," notably) are larded to the point of bursting with ironic asides, arch giggles, and conspiratorial winks to the reader to acknowledge that we sure are cooler *now* than those people were back *then.* Mercifully, here we just got a bunch of old-timey (like, 1950s-70s) recipes, mixed in with the "Retro..." series' signature period artwork, fonts, and colorful presentation. We can add our own hipster swagger if we want while we offer up some of "Mother's Cinnamon Flop" (p. 94) or "Sunday Mornin' Hotcakes" (p. 114). But even if we don't, we'll still wind up with what on the whole look like some pretty appetizing starts to the day. The phrase "look like" does remind me, though, of one disappointing fact: the illustrations that accompany given recipes don't always seem to be illustrations *of* the given recipe. It's hard to tell sometimes if we're looking at the actual dish, or just something similar from the archive. Some of us were fortunate enough to have enjoyed breakfasts like this with our Saturday morning cartoons, back in the good old days, and it's a nice stroll through our memories to have them available to us again. And even if we never get around to making any of these things, the book itself is a great retro reference to have around.