The Gilded Age Christmas Cookbook
Cookies and Treats from America's Golden Era
The Gilded Age Christmas Cookbook is Becky L. Diamond’s entertaining guide to late nineteenth-century holiday sweets, decorations, and customs. Studded like a literary plum pudding with recipes, illustrations, and Christmas lore, it shows how to celebrate the season with all the elegance and excess of an American robber baron.
Expert advice points the way to recreating authentic Gilded Age goodies, including mince pies, sugar plums, and raisin penuche, with recipes adapted for modern kitchens and palates. Diamond describes how European Christmas traditions were transformed and incorporated into American popular culture in an era of increasing affluence and rapid technological change. Baking scores of holiday cookies, for example, was necessary for trimming Christmas trees, mantels, and windows; cookies were also given out as gifts in hand-decorated boxes or tucked into ever-larger stockings.
Abundant recipes for cookies, cakes, candies, and other sweet confections, including jelly doughnuts for Hanukkah celebrations and lavish sweetmeat spreads for New Year’s Day, are interspersed with factual asides about holiday traditions. Numerous photographs of the fancy tablescapes and Christmas decorations of Lyndhurst Mansion impart the perfect historical backdrop. Other festive illustrations and quotes by Victorian authors evoke even more period atmosphere.
This showcase of Gilded Age Christmas trimmings unearths absorbing, sometimes surprising, facts, as with a description of the fiery, dangerous children’s party game of Snapdragon; speculation on which historical figure served as Dickens’s inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge; and nuggets about how modern versions of Christmas cards, Santa Claus, tree lighting, and Yule logs entered American social history at this historical juncture.
A delectable treat for devotees of Victoriana, The Gilded Age Christmas Cookbook is a fun historical cookbook for elevating festive gatherings with tasty treats.
Reviewed by
Rachel Jagareski
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
