Cooking with Mrs. Appleyard

by Elizabeth Kent Gay and Louise Andrews Kent

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879835974
• ISBN13: 9780879835972
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Keats Publishing
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 2.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Always wonderful, but this is a compilation volume

Mrs. Appleyard, aka Louise Andrews Kent, is an utterly charming writer. Her cookbooks are laugh-out-loud funny. She comes off as quirky, opinionated, superficially self-righteous and scatterbrained but half-secretly humble and aware of her faults; the tension between the two sides of the character is deftly handled. Kent also wrote a memoir, Mrs. Appleyard and I, that is interesting in its own right, as it suggests intriguing differences between her cookbook-author persona and the real woman. The Boston Brahmin and debutante married into an old, landed family from rural Calais, Vermont, the Kents of Kents Corners, related to Atwater Kent. Her adventures in the inconvenient antique farmhouse, throwing ambitious dinner parties for artsy, pompous, lovable "summer people" and indulgent locals, form the narrative basis of these books. The recipes themselves are worthy if sometimes weird. This book is a compilation of three others: Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen, Mrs. Appleyard's Summer Kitchen, and Mrs. Appleyard's Winter Kitchen. The page numbers given with the publisher's information, 328 pages, are incorrect. The third one ends on p. 328, but the three books combined total around 1000 pages. If you don't have any of the other books, this is an economical choice; you'd crave another after reading one anyway. Since the product information does not indicate this is a three-in-one book, though, it wasn't a good choice for me, as I already owned two of them. I'm sending it back so it can be someone else's treasure.