Six Books, Six Meals. Find the Period Source.
Authors describe food. They almost never give you a recipe.
Dickens spends a paragraph on the Cratchit pudding and not one measurement. Building a workable recipe from a literary description means separating what the text actually says from what your mind supplied. That is the foundational skill of close reading, with a result you can taste.
Six classic books, all out of copyright and free to read. The same six appear in every volume with harder questions each time, because returning to a book you love with better tools is what literary study is.
Reconstruction from a description is guesswork until it is checked. At this level your student works with real period cookbooks (Hannah Glasse 1747, Amelia Simmons 1796, Eliza Acton 1845, Mrs Beeton 1861, all free online) and keeps a change log documenting every adaptation.
Inside:
- Six units on the same six classic texts
- Exact transcription with citation
- Reconstruction checked against period sources
- Measure pages sorting every decision by its source
- Research with proper citation
- Literary arguments with textual evidence
- Reading History pages
- Vocabulary pages, and how to read a recipe that says “a quick oven”
- A comparison capstone using all six texts
- A page for you in every unit
What you receive
- A printable PDF, 88 pages including the cover, 8.5 × 11 inches, designed to print clearly in black and white on a home printer.
- A family license: print as many copies as your household needs, for every child, every year.
- Your file is available only from the download page. It is not sent through a link in your order confirmation email, so please download it from the download page.
A first edition, shaped by the families who use it
Written by Gina Steffy. This is a first edition, and we would love your help making the next one better. If a page is unclear, something is missing, or an idea would work better at your table, please tell us. We welcome every suggestion and will build the best of them into future editions.
Every purchase includes free updates. When a new edition is released, you will receive it at no additional cost.
Lisa Nehring and her husband, Dr. David Nehring, a Clinical Psychologist, and Biblical Scholar speak together on a wide variety of topics, including education, classical education, vision, mission, parenting, marriage, and more.
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