I’m so lucky that Dan Rosenberg asked me to write this book. Somehow he knew that as a fiction writer, cookbook author, lover of historic and heirloom recipes, and utter nostalgia-hound that I would be electrified and enchanted by the project.
Thanks also go to Ellen Boeke, who helped me research and develop some of the recipes, just as she did for The Bonne Femme Cookbook a few years back. Her admiration for Louisa May Alcott and her enthusiasm for this project mirrored mine, and helped make this a better book. And what great luck to have Karen Wise (once again) as my copyeditor.
The HathiTrust Digital Library of Early American Cookbooks allowed me to go deeper into the cooking of Alcott’s day than I ever imagined I could. The collection was mostly a boon, but sometimes a setback: I could spend hours lost in the pages of the recipes and cooking wisdom of the time—deadlines be damned.
And to David Wolf: What can I say? Sharing the table with you all these years—what a blast.