Mini Review: The Cowboy's Cookbook by Sherry Monahan

Title: The Cowboy's Cookbook: Recipes and Tales from Campfires, Cookouts and Chuck Wagons
Author: Sherry Monahan
Format: egalley
Pub. Date: August 4th 2015
Source: Rowan and Littlefield


Book Description:

From chuckwagon recipes to dutch-oven favorites for your own campfire, The Cowboy's Cookbook features recipes, photos, and lore celebrating the cowboy’s role in the shaping of the American West. From songs sung around the campfire after hearty meals of steak, beans, and skillet cornbread to the recipes you'll need to recreate those trailside meals in your own kitchen, this book will get you in touch with the spirit of the Old West.

Sherry Monahan is the President of Western Writers of America, and holds memberships in Women Writing the West, the Author’s Guild, the Wild West History Association, National Genealogical Society, Association of Professional Genealogists, and the National Women’s History Museum. She has her own column (Frontier Fare) in and is a contributing editor for True West magazine. Other publications include Mrs. Earp and Frontier Fare (both TwoDot) Tombstone Times, Tombstone Tumbleweed, Tombstone Epitaph, Arizona Highways, and other freelance works. She was a contributor to The Best of the Best of Arizona and Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work.

Review:

★★★

Thanks to my recent binge reading of romance novels, I've gotten quite the infatuation with cowboys. I also really love to cook. So, it made complete sense to me that I needed to read The Cowboy's Cookbook. Unfortunately, it wasn't what I expected.

It's divided into sections for ease of access, such as the introduction, guide to the dutch oven, a list of cowboy slang, photos, and history.

I would have rated this book higher if it was marketed as more of a food history book and not a cookbook, since there was more information on history and the like and less emphasis on how to cook. It was cool learning the meaning of the slang and seeing why cowboys cooked some of the things that they did, and how they became so popular. However, it reads more like a text book than a text book. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not at all what I was expecting when I got this book.

The recipes in this book, I can take or leave. While it was interesting to see them coupled with the history, I'm not very likely to try to make them in the future. They were really easy, basic things such as coffee and beans. Plus, there were next to no pictures for the recipe sections. That's a really important thing to me in a cookbook, and it's another way this one fell short for me.

I think this is a great book for those who are interested in Western history or food history, or for those who are looking for simple recipes to begin with. But if you're looking for a true "cookbook" with lots of recipes and pictures, maybe give this one a pass.

I received a copy in exchange for my honest review.