Carol Fisher: Freelance Writer

The American Cookbook: A History

McFarland Publishers & Company, Inc., Publishers (2006)

Walter Williams Major Work Award (Missouri Writers Guild)

This book serves up the American cookbook as a tasty sampler of history, geography, and culture. It was not until 1796 that cooks in America had available to them, a cookbook written by an American for American cooks.

Amelia Simmons filled that void with her small cookbook, American Cookery, published in Hartford, Connecticut. Fisher's book explores a generous and diverse selection of American authored and American published cookbooks that became available to cooks during the next  200 plus years following the publication of Simmons' cookbook.

Pot Roast, Politics, and Ants in the Pantry: Missouri's Cookbook Heritage

University of Missouri Press (2008) co-author John C.Fisher

Walter Williams Major Work Award (Missouri Writers Guild) 2nd place

"The Fishers demonstrate that what peoplle eat and how they fix it as chronicled over time in the cookbooks of Missouri, help us understand the nature and characteristics of the state, its people, its culture, and its past.

While few readers would elect to return to the primitive technologies of yesteryear, there is today no doubt a growing wistfulness for simpler times when, for example, pies were made from scratch and cookbooks could purport to offer recipes for 'every species' of them. The Fisher's book will not disappoint." ---TOM HARTE, author of Stirring Words: Reflections and Recipes from "A Harte Appetite"

Food in the American Military: A History

McFarland Publishers & Company, Inc., Publishers (2011)

co-author John C. Fisher 

*Walter Williams Major Work Award  (Missouri Writers Guild)

American soldiers and sailors have progressed from simple campfire and ship's deck cooking to today's nutritionally sound, menu diverse, high tech, and ethnically correct feeding options.

This book describes in great detail the development of rations used by America's military war by war from the Revolutionary period to the present, especially the challenges of preserving and transporting the food. 

It discusses research into rations, the evolution of the training of cooks and bakers and others, and various methods of storage, preparation, and distribution of food. Numerous first-person accounts appear throughout the book from Revolutionary War times to modern military times.

* The Fishers were the recepients of the Linda D.Russo Travel Grant from The Culinary Trust. The grant helped finance travel expences for the military food book. Their research involved a ten thousand mile road trip to historical military points of interest.