The Commune Cookbook

by Crescent Dragonwagon

188 pages

Published January 1, 1972

About the author

Crescent Dragonwagon is the daughter of the writers Charlotte Zolotow and the late Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow. She is the author of 40 published books, including cookbooks, children's books, and novels. With her late husband, Ned Shank, Crescent owned the award-winning Dairy Hollow House, a country inn and restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for eighteen years. She teaches writing coast to coast and is the co-founder (with Ned) of the non-profit Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in the early 1970s, naïve and unintentionally funny at times, Dragonwagon’s book about the kitchen life of a commune includes period piece recipes, rants about healthy eating, and some political opinions that she has to have abandoned by now (e.g., the belief that “liberating,” read “stealing”, stuff you want is perfectly legitimate and should be one method used to provide food for you and yours). This book shows some of the themes Dragonwagon has continued to develop in her later books, such as the intimate, sensuous connection with food many good cooks develop and its power to bring people together.

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The recipes themselves are hopelessly hilariously dated, as is the underlying theme of commune living as it's described here, though thankfully 'intentional communities' and vegetarianism are still with us.