Selected Recipes from the Saturday Evening Post: All-American Cookbook

This is a rather unassuming book of 96 pages and 225 recipes. I almost chucked it during a recent cookbook purge. Am I glad that I took a few seconds to flip through this modest book and saved it from the scrap heap. I was surprised at how many of my `standard' recipes have come from this book. I recommend it strongly: it is a good resource for ordinary home cook. My main objection: this pesky thing does not have an index, and TOC barely exists. Good luck searching for anything: you will have to simply flip entire chapters. Upon closer examination, the bloom comes off of the rose. Many recipes, especially those in the meat and vegetable chapters, have procedures that are very common to the others. On the good side, it means that the author has taken the time to test and standardize the recipes. On the bad side, it means the original culinary techniques peculiar to that recipe have been washed away by the author's sensibilities. This increases the chances of success when you try one of her recipes, but it also blows away whatever authenticities the recipe had in the beginning. I also note that the author has taken the effort to add a few more instructions than the standard recipe might have. This is a great help to the newbie home cook. I also note frequent missing ingredients, and ambiguous or missing steps in the recipe procedures. That objection aside, however, my standard preparations for muffins, pancakes, fried chicken, steak with brandy sauce, chicken fricassee, baking powder biscuits, shortbread, pecan pie, and whole wheat brownies have come from this book. So, now you know one of my secrets. One troubling aspect of this book is the lack editorial information. It has a sing-song one page introduction before forging ahead immediately into the recipes. Since I am lazy, I did not do the research to find out if the recipes in this book are verbatim from the Saturday Evening Post, or if they have been `corrected' by the present author. It has chapters on: Meat, Soup, Vegetables, Bread, and Dessert. One major format problem is that each of these chapters is helpfully subdivided into sections, but these are not listed in rather Spartan table of contents.