Midwest Made

Starred review from October 7, 2019
Baker Sever (Pure Vanilla) highlights more than 125 sweet and savory Midwestern dishes in this enticing and homey cookbook. Noting the regionalisms of Midwestern baking—“recipes that show up in one place won’t necessarily show up all over the region”—Sever serves up pages of toothsome comfort food as she shares the background on many of the recipes. Noting that the first-ever-published banana bread recipe, from 1930s food writer Mary Ellis (“a veritable prototype for Martha Stewart”), is pitch perfect, she doesn’t change a thing. Others, like the classic brownie—which originated at Chicago’s Palmer House hotel in 1893—gets an update with the addition of pure peppermint extract. She gives cinnamon rolls an ingenious boost with Chinese five-spice powder; the addition of red wine puts her Sweet Cherry Slab Pie over the top; and the inclusion of sour cream and brown sugar elevates homemade frozen custard. She rounds out the volume with such delightfully quirky recipes as the Donut Loaf, a bread that tastes like a donut (it’s the nutmeg); decadent layered oatmeal and chocolate in the Chocolate-Espresso Revel Bars; and Nebraskan runzas, a handheld meat pie filled with spiced beef and cabbage. Sever delivers hit after hit in a collection that will appeal to bakers of all skill levels.

Starred review from October 1, 2019
Buy this for the amazing homage to Midwestern baked goods of many tastes and shapes?125 recipes, to be exact. Borrow and read it to learn the difference between Chicago and New York cheesecakes, understand the derivation of the almost flourless Monster cookie, and master the browning of butter. In her fourth book, Sever (Pure Vanilla, 2012) cuts to the chase by admitting her motto: no carb left behind. She meanders through the middle of the country, from the Dakotas to Ohio, Michigan to Missouri, with an absolute instinct for the best pastries, pies, savories, cakes, and the like. Her writing is superb, and even giggle-producing, as she reminisces about relatives, the secret to counter-cakes, and wedding cookie tables (who knew?). When it comes to her recipes, there's no stopping (and no choosing): coffee caramel monkey bread, Cleveland-style cassata cake, red berries and cream gelatin mold, Swedish limpa, big soft pretzels, State Street brownies (born in 1893 at the Palmer House in Chicago), Dutch letters from Pella, Iowa, and something simply called a pan full of happy. Great color photographs, clear directions that soothe home bakers, and an oven's worth of tips solidify this as a must-read and -have.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)