Square Meals

by Jane Stern and Michael Stern

Book Overview

This revised and updated edition of the classic Square Meals is a celebration of American food from the 1920s through the 1950s, a salute to the days of lunch counters and the times when Sunday dinner... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394531124
• ISBN13: 9780394531120
• Release Date: September 1984
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 337 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Square Meals - a cookbook with an abundance of good recipes

337 pages with recipes on almost every page, interspersed with interesting historical notes along with many black and white images. However, there are very, very few images of representative recipes. Still, I look forward to using this cookbook.

Square Meals: America's Favorite Comfort Cookbook is my all-time favorite.

I loved the book, the recipes and have made a few meals. Those that like comfort food would benefit from this book. The recipes are simple to make and enjoyable to eat. It takes you back in time when dinners were made at home, with love, and families ate together. Very well written.

Take Comfort in Comfort Foods!

I was in the mood to read the other day but nothing seemed to strike my fancy when I spied my well-thumbed copy of SQUARE MEALS. This is not just a cookbook, but a history of food and culture that takes us back to the white-gloved "ladies who lunch" of the 1940's to the suburbanites of the 50's and 60's. The recipes are wonderfully familiar with pot roast, mac and cheese, and chicken noodle soup taking center stage. These are foods your grandmother cooked and there isn't a bean sprout in sight! Not only are the recipes great the stories and the history make for wonderfully satisfying reading. I would urge anyone with a love of food and a passion for kitchy history to get this and add it to their library.

This is a good BOOK, not just a good COOKbook.

Square Meals is definately a good read, whether that be in the bathtub or in bed, my two favorite places to pick it up. If ever two people were destined to help us feel comfort when eating, it is Jane and Michael Stern. They truly give new meaning to the words "comfort food" not just by sharing recreated recipes for the food of our youth, but the setting in which to serve it, and the rules by which to eat it. I knew these authors KNEW me, shared my childhood, when I reached the soda fountain section and they debated the question I debated so often myself: When presented with a small pitcher of hot fudge with your ice cream, do you portion it out so there is always an equal ratio? Do you dribble it on? or....do you drink the hot fudge in a pure, hedonistic ritual. Ah yes. My youth, recaptured here, with some mighty fine recipes for those nights when only Tuna Casserole and a rented video will make you feel better.

cabbage heads and kings

We had a hawaiian cowboy party, yes, a Don Ho Down. People came dressed a little hawaiian, a little cowboy. The biggest hit food wise was...well...you take a cabbage, hollow out the top, get a can of sterno,light it, take some skewers, poke them in the cabbage, put small sausages on the skewers...then you take out the skewers and heat them on the sterno....Those hawaiian cowboys had just been indoctrinated into the wonderful world of The Sterns, and Square Meals. I have always called Square meals the way real people eat, or ate in the forties, fifties, sixties but it aint just a cookbook(by the way, the mac and cheese is great)...but a fabulous introduction to two of the nations greatest pop sociologists, Jane and Michael Stern. Jane and Michael have explored Elvis, gone around the country eating in diners and dives, written an encyclopedia of Bad Taste, These people are in love with America in the muted, nostalgic tones that America comes off the best in. Square meals puts you in touch with a gentler, kinder time, where the people were nice and the food was fattening. I cannot recommend this cookbook and the work of the sterns enough

Tasty, fun and educational!

Absolutely one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, Square Meals is fun to read and the recipes are delicious. Jane and Michael Stern clearly love food, love fun and love our culinary history. Several of my best dependable recipes are in these pages - Mom's Best Pot Roast, Perfect Mashed Potatoes, and Mary Jane's Rice Pudding with Cream. (I can't quite bring myself to prepare "Undescended Twinkies", however.) As a cookbook collector and an avid cook, I can tell you that these recipes stand the test of time. Long after truffle oil and wasabi mashed yams have lost their appeal, you will still pine for Deep Dish Apple Pie and the memories it conjures. And I hope your copy, like mine, is inscribed "from your sweet-lovin' daddy."