Soothing

I just got the cookbook A Soothing Broth in the mail. (I got my copy on eBay; the info here is from Amazon and the book is out of print but well worth scrounging up. Amazon often can get out-of-print or used items, and I don't display that information on the reviews pages.) It's filled with "invalid" recipes, mainly culled from old cookbooks--things we've forgotten how to do in our obsession with quick fixes (Dayquil anyone? or, my alternative: GO TO BED!).

This is a book written, I can already tell, by a kindred spirit, a woman who loves 19th century novels and ancient cookbooks. As a young wife, she tended to her husband in the midst of a very bad bout with the flu, and afterwards thought about how helpless she felt: "In my continuing reading through old novels I caught tantalizing bits of information--teas made of beef, broths fortified with wine, and steaming milk custards with bits of toast floating on top. Surely, I thought, these were preferable to canned soup [Lynn says: Nearly anything is preferable to canned soup, ill or not.] But that was all I could find about them, names in books, administered by wise and calm women in crinolines who moved with assurance around the intricacies of the sickroom."

So she spent several years digging through old cookbooks, which always had in addition to instructions on cookery advice on keeping house and tending to the sick. And out of that research she made this book. And I'm going to go read it. Happy me!