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Bought this book at the recommendation of Eat Your Books. The stories of the immigrant women are inspiring. The book needed more recipe testing and editing. I have made 4 of the recipes and each is missing something, either in method, explanation or even an ingredient. Was surprised to make a meatball recipe that called for no salt and nothing or no other ingredient would provide that needed balance. I should explain that after home cooking for many years, I now am very careful about the source of recipes that I use. These authors thoroughly test their recipes, so I seem to rarely have a problem with the outcome anymore.

Interesting. I've tried several recipes quite successfully. The only meatball recipe I see has salt - much more salt than I would use but then I salt very lightly. I've tried Daisy's winter melon soup, Soon's bibimbap and Monika's pierogies. Can you be more specific as to which recipes don't work? It would not be surprising for the book to have very uneven editting.

Ann.Heindel - it would be very helpful if you could add Ratings and Notes (and photos if you have them) on Heirloom Kitchen for the recipes you have cooked (and you mjes). There are no Notes on the book's recipes currently. Notes helps all EYB members when they are cooking a recipes, if they can see any issues others have experienced.

I too have the Heirloom Cookbook and also love the stories. Am making the Pierogies this week, any advice? I made the Pastitsio dish earlier and thought the directions were surprisingly complicated. Lots of things I would change in the way the recipe was worded. 

For instance, I've been making Bechemal Sauce since I was 12 years old and never have I made it or seen instructions to make it they way they asked you to! They asked you to heat up (and get dirty) an entire extra pan just for the milk! I've always made the roux, and slowly stirred in the milk that I got straight from the fridge and it's always worked out fine!

But then you get to the eggs, and they hardly bother explaining that you need to temper them before going into the mixture! I've never seen such a complicated way to make Bechamel Sauce before. Maybe it's just me, but I also dislike making so many things separately in another dish or pan which gets dirty, only to combine them all in the end.

Why not cook the hamburger with the onion? Why cook one seperate, take it out of the pan, dirty another dish, only to have to recombine it later? This is the kind of stuff I just skip, Next time it will be cooked together and I will not have 20,000 dishes, pots and pans to clean up when I'm done. 

I would say your criticism is fair. But I liken it to steps my Grandmother and Mother taught me that are no longer required because of the changes in milk, flour, meat ... thanks to the differences in health regulations and in commercial/home grown products. I'm not gathering my own eggs, worrying about mice getting into the flour, using raw milk. So I take the directions as an interesting snapshot in time of how a particular person does it ... and then do it however I want. But I should admit my son complains I never do a recipe exactly as written; I point out that I'm simply skipping a step - he does everything according to recipe once and then adjusts as he sees fit.

The only thing I remember specifically about the pierogies was that I was glad I'd taken a class on them a few weeks earlier. Otherwise, I might not have believed how soft the dough was ... but it worked fine.