Pemmican and pickled plums, sauerkraut and salmi of quail, Swedish flatbread and Bohemian kolaches and Danish meat roll, dishes familiar and foods exotic--you'll find them in this cook's tour of the state from Lewis and Clark to the Age of Elegance, for in its cuisine as in its weather Nebraska is a land of variety and extremes. Interspersed with the recipes are descriptions of food preparation and fare which tell us much about how our forebears lived--industriously, ingeniously, and sometimes very well. Although many of the recipes could not be duplicated in today's kitchens, there is plenty here to challenge and stimulate amateur and professional chefs--and plenty of food for thought for social historians.

The tale of the 1846-1847 Donner Party whose members were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Anthropologist, Terry Del Bene uncovers the layers of social and cultural belief and action that resulted in the tragedy. To lighten the mood, the author also includes 19th century recipes that the travelers cooked on the trail--before the food ran out.

In the early 1980s, on assignment from the American Museum of Natural History, Raymond Sokolov crisscrossed America in search of traditional regional cuisines. He returned with a cornucopia of recipes that few at the time seemed eager to preserve--recipes such as boudin blanc, persimmon fudge, and, for the truly adventurous, roast bear paws. The essays here collected were meant to celebrate these vanishing, quintessentially American foods. Since its first publication, however, Fading Feast has proven to be not a farewell, but the forerunner of renewed interest in these regional treasures. Written with panache and gusto--and featuring eleven essays not included in the original version--this new edition is as timely and entertaining now as when Sokolov first set out to record our native culinary customs.