Books
Northern Comfort: The New England Baking Tradition
Traces New England's rich baking tradition with historic recipes, carefully adapted for the modern kitchen.
United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook
Explores multiple histories—of cookbooks, printing, material and literary culture, and region—to illuminate the meaning and affirm the importance of American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, America’s first cookbook.
Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England
Going beyond reprints of single cookbooks and bland adaptations of historic recipes, this book puts the New England cooking tradition on display in all its unexpected—and delicious—complexity. Northern Hospitality will equip readers with all the tools they'll need for both historical understanding and kitchen adventure.
America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking
At once a sharp assessment and a savory recollection, America’s Founding Food sets out the rich story of the American dinner table and provides a new way to appreciate American history. Now available in paperback and ebook!
Puritan Legacies: Paradise Lost and the New England Tradition
by Keith Stavely
Milton's characters—Adam and Eve, Satan—are juxtaposed with the experiences of representative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Englanders. Stavely shows that these figures, whether imagined or real, alike confront contradictions at the heart of Puritan ideology—between hierarchy and equality and between idealism and material enterprise.
Praise and Awards
United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook (2017) was recognized as a key work of culinary and regional history.
"one of the best researched . . . works written about any American culinary topic"
~Andrew F. Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
"one of the best books about Connecticut history in a generation" ~Walter W. Woodward, Connecticut State Historian
"detailed and fascinating" ~Choice
"an original contribution to the literature on postrevolutionary culture and society" ~Journal of American History
"Stavely and Fitzgerald have found so many connections, have thought to ask so many of the right questions, have managed to see so much and have packed so much scholarship into this book with so light a touch" ~Petits Propos Culinaire
"readers will find themselves eagerly positing which cookbooks they want to give the United Tastes treatment to"
~New England Quarterly
"for both seasoned food historians and those unaccustomed to thinking of how politics might inform what comes onto a dinner plate, United Tastes is a refreshing and illuminating read" ~Connecticut History Review
United Tastes won the BRUCE FRASER AWARD for 2017, from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History (ASCH).
"United Tastes is lively and erudite in equal measure, and a particularly valuable contribution to the literature of Connecticut history" ~award citation, Connecticut History Review
Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (2011) was called
"an excellent and original attempt to go deep into the detail of New England's cooking heritage" ~Times Literary Supplement
"[an] unexpected gem in the ocean of works on food" ~Library Journal
"nothing less than a meditation on the evolving New England mind through the prism of its foodways" ~British Food in America
America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (2004), their debut in food history, was praised as
"[a] careful, scholarly account [that] emphasizes social change and its influence on gastronomy" ~Times Literary Supplement
"to read this book as a sort of dictionary of New England foods is a joyful experience" ~H-Net
America's Founding Food was also deemed a "classic tome" (Choice) and awarded a 2005 Best of the Best from University Presses selection by the American Association of University Presses.