What was ground-breaking about the West Coast Cook Book?
The West Coast Cook Book can be seen as a bridge between the earlier chatty non-scholarly voice in American cookery books (a la Joy Of Cooking) and the later more authoritative type of voice in books like James Beard’s American Cookery; a voice that eventually evolved to scholarly and utterly serious in books like Reay Tannahill’s Food In History and Karen Hess’s Carolina Rice Kitchen.
