America’s Collectible Cookbooks is a wonderful concoction of gossipy morsels and serious reflection about cookbooks and cookbook authors. Although the names Fannie Merritt Farmer, Eliza Leslie, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Irma Rombauer are familiar to generations of American books, few know how really extraordinary these women were. In Mary Anna DuSablon’s look at the two hundred-year evolution of American cookbooks, these authors receive their due—not simply as recipe peddlers, but as shapers of American culture. The book describes how government and industry joined forces to woo women back into the kitchen after the world wars. And it hails the role of the cookbook as a fund-rasier during the many years of social reform.

Some other tantalizing topics include:

• What did New York’s “Inelligence Offices” have to do with cookbooks?

• Where can one find John Steinbeck’s recipe for “Tortilla Flats,” or Joan Crawford’s “Surprise”?

• Graham crackers are a descendant of which important New England cookbook author?

• Which famous chef (who was not a chef) wrote a cookbook but could not cook?

• What cookbooks still found in many American homes are collectible treasures?

• Who were the women (and men) behind Betty Crocker, the most successful, but nonexistent, cookbook autor in America?

The reach is invited to savor twelve-course dinners, Pork Chops with Truffle Sauce, “Pompkin” Pie, and the wholesome gourmet delicacies of Molly Katzen (The Moosewood Cookbook) and Marian Morash (The Victory Garden Cookbook). In America’s Collectible Cookbooks, we find that DuSablon convincingly reclaims American cuisine as the invention of, who else? American women.