A wanna-be coffee-table book. Half of the book (all of the right-hand pages) is pretty pictures of food and/or ingredients.

The other half has pictures, recipes, and captions. I thought the book would contain actual Civil War recipes, and maybe it does, but I have my suspicions: some of the recipes are described as "updated" (in what ways is left unsaid), and the author seems to use words like "original," "traditional," and "authentic" with enough care for me to view them as weasel-words in respect to the recipes' actual-Civil-War-ness. Apparently the book was published with the idea that one can prepare the included recipes for oneself; however, some recipes lack quantities for certain ingredients, or omit certain instructions. And whereas the photograph sources are credited, the recipe sources are not.

In each page's general comments on Civil War military food, the author states some very suspect things as fact (e.g., that dysentery among soldiers had to do with the greasiness of their food, or that saltpeter is rock-salt). The proportion of things I found suspicious on their face is high, and I'm just a dilettante.

The comments on Civil War military cookery are repetitive. One could wish for more careful copyediting. Using "a piece of butter the size of an egg" to indicate 4 Tbsp of butter in the ingredient list was cute the first time and tiresome the other six. There are other, less consistently employed historical cutseyisms.

It gets two stars because I learned two things from it: what paste has to do with pastry, and why beaten biscuits are called that. ( )