Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

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.

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.

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 e-book!

We contributed two entries, "Boardwalks" and "Fudge." You can order a copy of what Adam Gopnik calls "a delicious encyclopedia" here.

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.