The Green Gables Kitchen Companion: 47 Seasonal Recipes (PDF)

Old recipes, made usable again.

Most old recipes are close to unusable as written. They assume you know what a moderate oven is, that you can judge butter by the size of an egg, and that you keep a cold pantry rather than a refrigerator. So they get skipped, and the cooking that went with them gets lost, which is a shame, because a great deal of it was very good.

This book is that cooking put back into a form you can actually use. Forty-seven recipes drawn from the world of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and the working Prince Edward Island farmhouses it was written about, arranged across spring, summer, autumn and winter, because that is how the cooking actually happened.

WHAT EVERY RECIPE CARRIES

A headnote, so you know what you are making and where it came from.

Ingredients converted to standard cups and weights, with a stated yield.

A method, numbered and complete, with nothing assumed.

The historical context. How Island kitchens managed it, with a wood stove and no refrigeration, and why that made the dish what it is.

A modern kitchen note. What to watch, what changed for a modern oven, and how long the finished thing keeps at room temperature, in the refrigerator and frozen.

That last part is the one most cookbooks leave out. Every one of the forty-seven answers it.

WHAT IS INSIDE

Spring. Tea biscuits, white bread, maple taffy on snow, rhubarb crumble, wilted dandelion greens, buttermilk pancakes, pea soup, seed cake, spiced Easter buns, fresh churned butter.

Summer. Raspberry cordial, lemon barley water, strawberry preserve, blueberry grunt, blackberry jam, layer cake with boiled icing, cucumber salad, cold poached trout, gooseberry fool, currant scones, picnic egg sandwiches, switchel.

Autumn. Apple tarts, Sunday roast chicken, creamed potatoes, squash soup, pickled beets, apple butter, harvest vegetable stew, cranberry relish, pumpkin bread, spiced pear preserve, cheese and onion pie.

Winter. Plum pudding, oatcakes, ginger cookies, brown sugar fudge, lemon pie, chicken pie, salt cod cakes, maple baked beans, scalloped potatoes, hot milk sponge cake, shortbread, barley soup, mincemeat tarts.

Illustrated throughout with original pen and ink drawings, with one opening each season.

THE PRINTABLE KITCHEN SHEETS

Ten printed sheets arrive with the book, as a second file.

The Keeping Chart, all forty-seven recipes alphabetically with how long each one lasts. The Preserving Year, what to put by and the season it is worth doing. The Ratio Almanac, nine proportions worth knowing and what goes wrong on either side of them. Tins and Temperatures. When You Have Run Out. What Went Wrong, symptom on the left and cause on the right. Putting Up Safely. Jar labels and gift tags you can type into or print blank. And two more for the Christmas baking.

Print them, put them inside a cupboard door, and stop looking things up mid recipe with flour on your hands.

THE PRACTICAL PART

Format: PDF, 141 pages, about 17 MB.

Delivery: instant download after checkout, plus a link by email.

Reading: any phone, tablet, laptop or e-reader that opens a PDF.

Printing: yes. Print the whole thing or a single recipe, at home or at a print shop.

Sized 6 by 9 inches, so printed pages sit neatly in a binder.

For your own kitchen. Please do not redistribute or resell.

Also available in paperback, if you would rather have it on the shelf. Get the paperback on Amazon — $14.99

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone who has read Anne of Green Gables and wondered what any of it tasted like. Anyone who likes cooking that takes its time. Anyone who has ever put an old recipe back on the shelf because it said bake until done and left it there.

If you want thirty minute weeknight dinners, this is not that book. The plum pudding takes three hours and the Easter buns want a whole day. That is the point of them.

Written by Ida Marsh. Published by Guava Tree Press.