Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

Food historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald are the authors of three previous books on New England and American food history. Their fourth book, Northern Comfort: The New England Baking Tradition, will be published by New York University Press on November 3, 2026. Northern Comfort blends lively culinary history with tempting historical recipes adapted for the modern kitchen, appealing to home cooks and history lovers alike.

Stavely and Fitzgerald are available for interviews about Northern Comfort, New England food history, and traditional American cuisine. Click any image on this page to open a full-size version of the author photos, book cover, and selected food photos. Connect with them via their Contact page.

Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald are food historians and authors focusing on the culinary history of New England and the ways food reflects and shapes regional identity and culture. Before turning to writing and research full-time, both had careers as public librarians.
 
Stavely and Fitzgerald are the authors of America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (University of North Carolina Press, 2004; paperback and ebook, 2015); Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011); United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017); and Northern Comfort: The New England Baking Tradition (New York University Press, forthcoming November 3, 2026).
 
Their other publications include articles and essays in Smithsonian Magazine, the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and the international food history journal Petits Propos Culinaires. America's Founding Food was named a "2005 Best of the Best from University Presses" selection and United Tastes received the 2017 Bruce Fraser Award of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History. 
 
Stavely and Fitzgerald's work has been featured across television, radio, podcasts, and print and digital media. Their appearances and interviews include Chronicle (WCVB), 207 (WCSH), Good Food (KCRW), Radio Boston (WBUR), Front Porch (New Hampshire Public Radio), Grating the Nutmeg (the Connecticut History Podcast), Boston Magazine, Yankee Magazine, The Boston Globe, Boston.com, and The Tasting Table.
 
They live in Jamestown, Rhode Island.

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: November 3, 2026
Editions: Hardcover (9781479849703), Library ebook (9781479849727), Consumer
ebook (9781479849710)

Available in hardcover and ebook from:

NYU Press, 30% discount with code NYUAU30

Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

"Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald are our best historians of foodways, not only of New England but across the culinary canon. With their cookbook Northern Comfort they have now entered the kitchen to provide a practical analog of the lively insight that characterizes their scholarship. It is most welcome."
~Blake Perkins, Petits Propos Culinaires

"A meticulously researched, eloquently crafted and utterly captivating exploration of that most uplifting of the culinary arts. Packed with historical insights and practical tips, modern bakers will be inspired by these traditional recipes that preserve New England's food heritage."
~Sam Bilton, Host and Producer of the award-winning podcast, Comfortably Hungry

"Deeply informative collection of New England baking traditions. What makes this beautiful collection different is that it doesn't just list ingredients – it treats recipes as windows into the daily lives of everyday people from the past. Adapting recipes to modern kitchens was incredibly helpful. Highly recommend exploring the delicious recipes and rich stories of this book!"
~Bo Terrien, Goodreads reviewer

With fifty-two historic recipes thoughtfully adapted for the modern kitchen, along with lively chapter introductions and recipe headnotes that set the historical scene, Northern Comfort is both a practical cookbook and an engaging social history. Readers can bake alongside the abolitionist kneading dough for her immensely popular white bread, the teacher frosting one of the world's first layer cakes, and the housewife cutting through the thick crust of a meat pie. Whether you're a serious baker, a history buff, or a curious general reader, Northern Comfort offers a memorable journey into New England's baking legacy, bringing readers closer to the lives of the everyday people who helped build our nation. Combining superb storytelling and fascinating historical detail with appealing recipes, this unique book breathes life into New England's recipes from the past, providing readers with a very special way to celebrate and reflect on the nation's 250th anniversary. 

How New England cooking lost its way. A nostalgia campaign carried on by Yankees in the late nineteenth century, known as the colonial revival, reduced the region's vast culinary repertoire to a few clichéd foods. There's nothing wrong with baked beans and clam chowder, to be sure. But what about mouthwatering slapjacks, succulent fowl pies topped with puff pastry, fruit-studded plumb cakes, and so many other lost marvels of regional cuisine?

We may think we know pies . . . but do we? Pie did not originate as a dessert. For centuries, it graced elite tables in England and the colonies, filled with rare and expensive meats, fowl, and fish. Also tucked under the crust were delicate tidbits such as coxcombs, and newly "discovered" fruits and vegetables. Can the pie, now in sad decline, be restored to its former glory?

So what, exactly, is a "plumb" cake? Sponge cake, that stalwart of bakery shelves and box mixes, is a relatively recent invention. Before the light and airy confection dominated the American cake landscape, most Americans, like their English cousins, baked a "plumb" cake when they wanted a festive and showy dessert.
 

Have you baked with suet or lard recently? Probably not. Early New Englanders loved these fats, and for good reason—they believed they made baked goods richer and more flavorful, adding a level of subtlety that butter alone couldn't provide. It just might be time to explore the surprising nuances of baking with fats that have largely disappeared from the modern kitchen.

 —from the headnote to "Amelia Simmons's Double-Crust Pumpkin Pie, 1796":

 
A dough spur, also known as a "jagger wheel," is a toothed disk with a handle for decorating pastry. It is itself a testament to the irrepressible artistic impulse. One way the crew members of whaling ships passed whatever spare time they had was to carve jagger wheels, such delicate implements of domesticity, out of the scrimshaw obtained from the whales killed and captured in the course of the epically "manly" enterprise in which they were involved. 

 —from the recipe:

Remove the top crust from the refrigerator and roll it out on a lightly floured work surface to a circle about 10 inches (25.4 cm) in diameter. Decorate it with a dough spur or knife in a cross-hatch pattern. Place it gently over the pie, being careful not to let it slip into the liquid pie filling.

Stavely and Fitzgerald have spoken at scholarly conferences and meetings including the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Culinary Historians of Boston and Washington, the Modern Language Association, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. They have also presented programs at historical societies, museums, libraries, and cultural institutions throughout New England, including the Connecticut Historical Society, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Rhode Island State House, the Boston Public Library, the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Stavely and Fitzgerald are available to speak about Northern Comfort. They can be reached through the Contact page on this website.