Esther H. Shank collected and perfected good recipes and useful food preparation tips for over 25 years. This is her prized collection of over 1'100 recipes and a legacy of kitchen know-how for inexperienced young adults caught up in the whirl of fast foods and busy schedules. Even experienced cooks will find helpful the hundreds of tips for success while baking bread and making pie crusts’ as well as the microwave and quick-fix sections’ identification of low calorie dishes’ and many useful charts’ tables’ and diagrams.

Winner of the 1988 Benjamin Franklin Award from Publishers Marketing Association.

Now available in a new layflat paper edition.

The Mennonite Disaster Service volunteers who helped build our Katrina Cottage in Pass Christian, Mississippi, introduced us to Esther Shank, and when she sent us her cookbook, we were pleasantly surprised. Containing more than 1,000 recipes she collected and perfected over 25 years, it’s an everything-and-then-some volume on the level of The Joy of Cooking–with a country slant. Next to recipes for classic casseroles, salads, and cookies are instructions for pasteurizing milk, cleaning fish, and plucking chickens. A section at the end also gives ‘non-food recipes, ’ such as how to make your own soap or houseplant fertilizer and tips for removing all kinds of stains. It’s a bible for old-fashioned self-sufficiency. – Jason Horn