Mary Rose Boswell

First published in 1987, this classic cookbook remains a timeless guide to Shaker cooking. While many books on Shaker food recreate recipes from ninteenth-century sources, this cookbook is based on lived experience. For eighty years, the author cooked in the Canterbury Shaker community in New Hampshire, one of the last active Shaker villages in the United States. It offers an authentic, firsthand profile of a way of life that continues to fascinate. True American recipes, derived from oral tradition, include: Irving Greenwood's Pot RoastCanterbury Shaker ParsnipsMoravian Sugar CakeOrange Zucchini Bars As well as the recipes, the book also gives an account of twentieth-century cooking and baking at the Canterbury Shaker Village. Mary Rose Boswell adds a new foreword.

This book explores the Shakers' herb gardening heritage. It combines colorful history, practical growing and harvesting advice, and a guide to existing Shaker gardens. You will learn here how to plan and plant you own Shaker garden-a garden you will enjoy all the more by understanding its links to a tradition that began in 1774. "The Earth Shall Blossom" provides: * Designs for your own color, fragrance, tea, culinary, or medicinal gardens * Gardening tips from the 19th-century Shakers' Manual as well as up-to-date advice on growing and preserving herbs * Descriptions of restored Shaker gardens from Maine to Kentucky * Shaker herbal recipes for kitchen, bath, and medicinal use * Over 60 illustrations, including period prints All of this is woven in with the entertaining and engaging history of the Shakers' agrarian life and their pioneering herb and herbal remedy business.