The Encyclopedia of Country Living

Customer Reviews

An excellent "first book" on practically any homesteading subject. Review by Penny V.

Value
Quality
Price

I got the book about six months ago from my new husband after pining for it for some while, and I'm still not all the way through it. Carla Emery has packed the book full of informative facts, instructions, recipes, and lively anecdotes on nearly any subject imaginable that you need to know about in the countryside, and then some.

One of the best chapters, and most useful right now has been the chapter on food preservation, as the author incorporated extensive instructions, fun recipes, and comprehensive tables of canning times for different products.

Since the book contains so much text, and in a very small font, without the more common "modern" layout, it can be very hard to find a specific recipe or a specific page again without some form of bookmarking system and annotations pencilled into the margins (colour-coded post-it tags work for me), as the physical book is more like a phonebook and brick's obese lovechild.

The book just isn't portable in its current shape and size, and hard to read unless leaned on something.

I knew what I was buying, and am okay with the lack of chic colour photos and illustrated diagrams more commonly seen in new books, but it's a fair warning, that the book is "old school" visually. I wouldn't mind seeing the book in print with a new, easier-on-the-eye layout of the text and a more thorough table of contents, (this might mean splitting it into a couple of volumes to make it easier to navigate). Despite the average score on the quality, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

For the price, you rarely get as much solid information and advice as from this book. You might have to spend twenty times the money to glean the same information from other books. This is well worth the purchase.

- Penny V.
Redmond, WA

P.S. I found out this Christmas, that my mother-in-law's "secret family recipes" for a lot of good dishes are really from her copy of this book, an earlier print that she bought in the 1970s. (Posted on January 27, 2012)