Heaps of fun, lots of good recipes and some nice historical notes inbetween. We've made some of the recipes, and enjoyed them.

As lifelong fan of The little house on the Prarie books and series, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Although it's a cookbook, it reads as an historic novel.

NOTE: This review is for the earlier edition.

Overall thoughts - thoroughly researched with so many lovely recipes. It contains relevant illustrations from the original series HOWEVER no pictures of the food, hence 4 stars.

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Each recipe in this cookbook is drawn from a passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and includes historical commentary. Yum.

This is a good reading book as well as being a good cookbook. It gave me quite a bit of insight into the Little House world from the perspective of the food they ate. It also made me realize what a big difference there was between the childhoods of Laura and Almanzo, just simply from the variety of food which would have been available to each. Many of the recipes look tasty and I definitely want to try them out.

If you read the Little House books and were fascinated with the descriptions of food -- this is for you. It's not just a cookbook, it's also a wonderful food history and social context to the actual series of books, which has never faded from my most beloved list of rereads on a rainy day. And also? Come on. It teaches you how to make pancake men.

Alternate title: Things No One Wants To Eat Ever. Blackbird Pie made with starlings you hunt yourself, cottage cheese balls (eat the curds and use the whey to fertilize your garden), and apples you dry by spearing on a curtain rod and hanging on a laundry rack near a radiator.

In this cookbook, Walker attempts to recreate the recipes for foods found in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. What's good about the book is that it pulls extensive quotes from Wilder's books and follows them with recipes; what's bad is that the recipes are mostly unworkable. They're not adapted to the modern kitchen and Walker also has an annoying tendency to refer to things using the words Wilder would have used (e.g., saleratus for baking soda, bake oven for dutch oven, bloodwarm for lukewarm). It's unlikely that anyone would attempt too many of these recipes even to see what cooking was like back then, since they're far too labor intensive. There's a recipe for Hard Cheese that involves ten days of turning the cheese and wiping off mold, then waiting five months for the flavor to develop. This is technically a children's book; no kid is going to wait five months for cheese. I'm an adult and on day two of mold-wiping, I'm going to toss that thing and head to Safeway for some shrink-wrapped cheddar.

Aside from being too much work, there's the food safety issue. In the holiday recipe for Roasted Stuffed Goose, which is one of the few times Walker specifies an oven temperature, you're instructed to roast the stuffed goose at 165° for eight hours. Merry Christmas! I got you salmonella!

It's an interesting idea for a book, but since the recipes aren't useful, this is mainly a collection of food quotes. I deducted one star because Walker didn't include a recipe for Laura's rhubarb pie with forgotten sugar, but added one star because the glossary includes a definition for "bunghole."

I read it and loved it! If you've read the "Little House" books, this one is a great compliment to those. The recipes are fascinating, very seasonal, and some of them are worth a try.

This is an interesting combination of Walker's trials in replicating food described in the Little House series, a look at what pioneer food/eating/cooking was like (particularly as they differ from today), and excerpts from various books in the series. While reading the books I would often wonder what, say, "hardtack" was (and what it tastes like), so I thought I would be totally gung-ho about making these different dishes. However, a glance at the ingredients in most of these recipes begs the question: did food have any flavor for those hardworking pioneers? (As example, here are the ingredients for hardtack: flour, water, and salt.) Still, even if I don't make a single recipe, this is a fun book and recommended for anyone who likes the Ingalls Wilder stories.

I'm in the middle of this book, and am really enjoying reading it. I owned the box set of the Laura Ingalls books when I was young, and read them over and over again! So, a good part of the enjoyment comes from the nostalgia of remembering the stories I loved so much 3-ish decades ago. :) However, it has not increased my desire to cook blackbird pie, or use QUITE so much salt pork in my cooking! I also doubt that I'll be making cracklins or very many of the other recipes, but reading about how they used to cook different things is quite enjoyable.

Update: I completely enjoyed reading the little snippets from the Little House books, and reading about what they ate and how they prepared it. I wasn't quite ready to start cooking prairie-style, but loved reading the book anyway.

Amazing book

Recipes from the classic Little House Books