A Prairie Kitchen

Developing recipes and sharing the results has been a lifelong vocation for Rae Katherine Eighmey. Today her kitchen library has thousands of recipes from 19th and 20th century cookbooks and pioneers' journals and magazines. It is her goal to make them easy for today's cooks to make in their own kitchens, and she has adapted hundreds of them for modern cooking methods. She says translating these recipes is part detective story, part chemistry and part old-fashioned cooking skill.

Katherine Rae Eighmey is the author of Hearts & Home: How Creative Cooks Fed the Soul and Spirit of America's Heartland, 1895-1939 and A Prairie Kitchen: Recipes, Poems and Colorful Stories from the Prairie Farmer Magazine, 1841-1900. She lives with her husband, John, in Ames, Iowa. The Eighmeys have two grown children and two grandsons.