Country Cooking: 2151 Recipes from the Readers of «Harrowsmith» Magazine.

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

If you’ve ever planted zucchini, here’s help—a rich harvest of 35 zucchini recipes. If the garden’s doing well, you’ll also appreciate the 49 recipes for tomatoes and the 44 for spinach. There’s more—over 2,000 more recipes in this massive compilation of recipes from Harrowsmith magazine. To put this in perspective, a typical cookbook has fewer than 200 recipes.

Harrowsmith started as the voice of the back-to-the-land folks and evolved as its readers matured through small-scale farming and avid backyard or urban guerrilla gardening phases to become the crunchy-granola set with an appreciation of wholesome, fresh food. All these interests are reflected in this recipe collection.

For those exploring the land there are recipes for nettle pie, dandelions in batter, pickerel cheek chowder, snapping turtle soup, and 21 ways to cook rabbit. Plant a garden and get ready to employ the bounty with hundreds of soup, salad, and casserole dishes. Fish, seafood, game (bear, beaver, moose, elk, and more), poultry, and other meats are definitely not overlooked, with hundreds of recipes for everything from lobster to giblet stew. Country classics are prominent—meatballs, head cheese, chili, cabbage rolls, date squares, watermelon, pickles. Or perhaps you need a few hundred recipes for pasta, grains, beans, eggs, breads, desserts, and preserves. And those crunchy-granola types? Not forgotten, they get 33 recipes for yoghurt, 16 for tofu, and dozens more for sprouts, wheat germ, soybeans, and, yes, granola.

The range is truly amazing, from subsistence fare to upscale and trendy. International influences are equally impressive, with dishes drawn from the cultures of Alaska, New Zealand, Africa, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Mediterranean, India, and Asia.

Ten menus serve as a starting point for those overwhelmed by the numerous recipe choices, and 40 full-page colour photos do a great job of establishing the country cooking atmosphere. Ingredients are listed in imperial measures only, and there is no nutritional analysis; both, deficiencies by today’s standards, are the result of recipes drawn from the magazine over its long publishing history. The presentation is straightforward—no glam, no claims to fame—just the ultimate in practicality.