Margaret Yardley Potter (1892–1955)

Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for Eat, Pray, Love, republished her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter's cookbook with a foreward and ten favorite recipes formatted to conform to today's recipe standards. The book includes advice on entertaining, cooking tips, and much more. She intersperses humor along the way. The author seemed to go out of her way to use less popular ingredients such as eel, tripe, kidneys, and such. While I've seen recipes for these in other cookbooks from the era, I usually find more things I consider palatable than in this collection. I think a collection from my own ancestors might look very different. I'm certain regional availability influenced the items in Mrs. Potter's cookbook as the food grown on the farm would have influenced the foods my ancestors prepared and ate. It got old reading the recipes in the original in-line format. I think Ms. Gilbert could have done everyone a favor by updating not just ten recipes but all of them, making it less of a reprint and more of an updated for today's reader edition.… (altro)