Barbara Swell began her baking career in Martinsburg, WV, on January 19th, 1962, when she whipped up her first batch of sugar cookies from her 4-H Club Pack-and-Snack cookbook. She is the author of a very popular series of historic cookbooks, including Log Cabin Cooking, Take Two and Butter 'Em While They're Hot, Secrets of the Great Old-Timey Cooks, The Lost Art of Pie Making, and others. Barbara lives in Asheville, NC, with her husband and their three children.

"An ideal and inexpensive gift for kitchen cookbook collectors, Barbara Swell's "Secrets Of The Great Old-Timey Cooks" is a simply wonderful compendium of historic American recipes, folklore and country wisdom. Profusely illustrated with historic photos and illustrations, readers will be treated to mouth-watering 'yesteryear cuisine' ranging from Mock Macaroni, Sweet Potato Dumplings, and Jam Windmills, to Apple Maple Duck, Coconut Stack Cake, and Apple Dumpling Pie. But "Secrets Of The Great Old-Timey Cooks" is far more than just another nostalgic cookbook. Readers are also provided with kitchen secrets from contemporary pioneer women, antique autograph rhymes, food providers and superstitions, love vine prediction, folk remedies, the kinds of chores women routinely had to do, and even weather lore. If you like to cook, have a fondness for 'the good old days', and are partial to some of the best eating former generations of accomplished women cooks had to offer, then secure your very own copy of "Secrets Of The Great Old-Timey Cooks"!" -- Midwest Book Review