Title:	The Modern Pioneer Cookbook: Nourishing Recipes From a Traditional Foods Kitchen
	Author:	Mary Bryant Shrader
	Published:	August 15, 2023, DK publishing
	No. of Pages:	304
	Cover Price:	$25.94 Hardcover, $12.99 Kindle

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If you have nothing better to do than make everything from scratch, you’ll want to pick up Mary Bryant Shrader’s cookbook, The Modern Pioneer Cookbook: Nourishing Recipes From a Traditional Foods Kitchen. This cookbook has recipes for all sorts of things most of us don’t have time to make; it’s like going back 100 years and skipping all the modern techniques that have made our cooking easier.

Shrader includes chapters on pickling and preserving, condiments, sourdough, sprouting, and other grass roots techniques that most of us don’t have much desire to do. There are a few good recipes for main dishes, but most of the recipes probably won’t appeal to the mainstream cook or baker.

Most of the recipes are time consuming – very few are quick, and they will remind readers of tree huggers and environmental types. The cookbook includes beautiful, professional photographs of many of the recipes, as well as a picture of the author at the beginning of each chapter (overkill?). The recipes are written in the traditional manner with a list of ingredients followed by step-by-step instructions. There are also comments at the beginning of each recipe.

This is grass roots cooking – something you’d expect from a great grandmother living on a farm. Readers who like this kind of thing will love this book; those of us who like doing things the modern way with modern gadgets, not so much.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.