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Boardin’ in the Thicket
Recipes and Reminisces of Early Big Thicket Boarding Houses

by Wanda A. Landrey

(University of North Texas Press, 1998)
ISBN: ISBN-10: 1574410547
ISBN-13: 978-1574410549


Book Review by John Troesser

East Texas on a China Plate

This author might have taken the easy way out and just printed recipe after recipe with little dingbats of crockery or cutlery separating one recipe from the next. If that was the case, you wouldn’t be reading about it here. Instead, we have very valuable sociological contribution to East Texas – the recipes are lagniappe. It’s not a cookbook and it’s not purely sociological – it’s both.

Information on the buildings, proprietors and occasional anecdotes of the houses and hotels come at the beginning of each chapter. Setting the table, so to speak, for the recipes.

Also included are a few recipes from the Galveston Harvey House cookbook – published for the first time. The book is a discovery of historic proportions for cooks, Harvey House buffs and the terminally curious. Bessmay, Silsbee, Kountze, Saratoga, Bragg, Baston, Sour Lake, Trinity and Colmesneil are towns included. A special effort was taken to make a good book better. The author sought vintage photographs and interviewed surviving people connected with the businesses.


Review by John Troesser
February 15, 2015

* Harvey Houses were restaurants operating in conjunction with the AT&SF railroad and gained a remarkable reputation for quality of food and service that has yet to be equaled.
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