Category Archives: Series: Wartime Recipes

“From the Dear-Times”; What a Scrapbook Can Tell Us of Household Management in Wartime

By Anna Katrine Werge Bønnelycke

Gentofte Municipality Archive in Denmark holds several personal recipe collections. Typically such collections are gathered over many years, sometimes a whole lifetime, and contain recipes written by hand for baked goods, pickling, and popular dishes.

Marie Prytz’s collection is different.[i] The cover of the simple notebook proclaims it to be “Fra Dyrtiden” (which translates to “From the dear-times” and refers to a period of rising prices during and after the First World War). The collection contains mainly newspaper and magazine clippings of recipes and advice for economizing cooking, storing, cleaning, and general household management in times of rationing and scarcity.

Fig. 1. Marie Prytz photographed in 1919; around the time she gathered her recipe collection. (Picture from Gentofte Municipality Archive).

Although Denmark remained neutral during the war, the national economy was strained and imports dwindled.[ii] The average Danish household had to face shortages, rationing, and unprecedented inflation.[iii] The Prytz household was well-off, but with eight children and a good deal of civic sense (Marie was elected to the municipal council in 1928), the rational use of commodities would have been an important matter to her.

The first page in the notebook is dedicated to an index categorizing the different recipes. There are the more general categories, such as “Drying of fruit” and “Marmalades.” But more timely categories also appear, including “War-butter” or “Barley bread” (barley being used as a wheat substitute).[iv] These consist of several clippings and notes describing different recipes and methods for the same food or dish.

There are many recipes for ersatz products including substitute butter, potato starch, and gelatine. Notably, the book includes seven different recipes for “war-time butter.” One calls for mixing ½ kg butter, 1 litre of whole milk, some flour, and “butter-coloring,” thereby producing 1.5 kg of butter. The many different recipes for this item underscore the importance of butter in the Danish kitchen at the time. For comparison, the collection contains only two recipes for ersatz coffee.

The book has no stains that suggest actual use in the kitchen, but handwritten notes and underlining point to it having been consulted and revised. For example, in the printed instructions for bottling, the description of covering the opening with parchment paper is supplemented with a handwritten note that the parchment should be scalded (probably to avoid molding). Additionally, in a magazine clipping that describes how to salt herring but lacks precise measurements, these are added in handwriting. The various recipes for the same dish and the handwritten notes give the impression that the book was meant for gathering a broader range of knowledge and not just as a practical manual.

Prytz’s book also contains clippings on salting, smoking, drying, pickling, canning, and bottling vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish. There is a clear difference in how comprehensive these categories are: preserving berries and fruit by making marmalade only consists of two clippings, which mainly describes how to use less sugar. Some handwritten notes offer tips on fruits and berries that mix well together; marmalade of pear “tastes of nothing,” but it could be mixed with quince, which also called for less sugar.

Fig. 2. Page showing directions for drying of among others rhubarb, rosehip, and apple. The handwritten note on the lower left side lists leaves that can be used for tea. (Picture from Gentofte Municipality Archive).


In contrast, canning of vegetables and even meat is described in more detail. There are also many clippings about drying; airdrying, drying in an oven, or drying over a heating-stove has detailed descriptions, and Prytz has carefully underlined the passages, which she, one can imagine, found especially useful. This indicates that jam-making was a skill that she and other homemakers were expected to have some prior knowledge of, whereas the practice of preserving other produce and using other methods was less familiar to the urban homemaker. This is perhaps unsurprising as cooking in the early twentieth century, and especially in cities, had been moving away from home production and towards store-bought consumption. But rationing and scarcity meant a renewed focus on self-sufficiency.

Cover of Marie Prytz collection (Picture from Gentofte Municipality Archive).

Homemakers in wealthy homes might not have felt the scarcity quite as much as those in working-class households, who were advised to replace meat with margarine and generally consume more plant-based goods.[v] But many, like Marie Prytz, felt a social responsibility to alter their consumption. Prytz’s scrapbook reveals wartime crisis management in a wealthy household and how a systematic and pragmatic homemaker dealt with the challenges through meticulously gathering and testing of data.

[i] Gentofte Municipality Archive, private archive concerning Marie Prytz, A122, lb.nr.: 4.1, Udklip med opskrifter “fra Dyrtiden”, 1915-1920.

[ii] Haastrup, Lisbeth, Hjemmegrisen, ”Første Verdenskrig Ved Tunestillingen: Forsvarsvilje Og Hverdagsliv”, Greve Museum, 2010.

[iii] Statistisk Aarbog 1922, Danmarks Statistik, www.dst.dk (30-03-2024).

[iv] Adriansen, Inge, ”Krigskost og ernæring”, Dansk Madhistorie. Mad i krig og krise, 2014.

[v] Halse, Sven, og Daniel Henschen, Mikkel Hindhede: Og Kampen Om Danskernes Kost, Aarhus University Press, 2020.


Anna Katrine Werge Bønnelycke holds a MA in History from the University of Copenhagen. She works as an archivist at Gentofte Municipality Archive. Her personal and archival interests include personal recipe collections, local history, historical cooking in practice, and the traditions of gingerbread.

Preparedness for the Unexpected: Expedient Recipes for Survival in Wartime China

By Chang Xu

If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text wasn’t intended solely for military use, despite what its title suggests. In the preface, the compiler Luo Shiyao explained that the collection grew out of his personal encounters with everyday illnesses.[i] His project belonged to a longer literati tradition in which scholars compiled and published practical encyclopedias and daily-use compendia, creating their own textual museums of useful knowledge. Since disease during military campaigns could be especially debilitating, as Luo observed, remedies proven effective under such extreme conditions then held particular value for the wider public, meeting an urgent need for survival in wartime.[ii]

Black-and-white text fills a page of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches.
Fig. 1. Preface of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches. Digitized and online at Google Books, URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/行軍方便便方/hylWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en.

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The manual contains 679 recipes, organized into six sections (see Table 1). What began as a personal collection of useful prescriptions unexpectedly revealed the remarkable efficacy of “expedient recipes” (bianfang). These recipes arguably relied only on ingredients that were familiar and accessible to readers: beans, chestnuts, vegetables, tea, and other mundane materials. They didn’t require rare or costly components, nor did they depend on professional diagnoses or individualized modification. Yet, when followed as directed, they consistently produced immediate, reliable results. In effect, the manual empowered its users to be their own doctors, as Yi-Li Wu also noticed in the case of women’s medicine.

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Section # of recipes
Preparedness for the Unexpected 26
Preventive Defense 45
Treating Injuries 117
Curing Illnesses 309
Rescue and Relief 71
Miscellaneous Addenda 111
  Total: 679

Fittingly, most of the recipes focus on treating injuries and illnesses, reflecting the compilation’s original purpose. But it is the recipes for preparing food and drink for the unexpected that appear first—framing the two as the foundation of survival. To underscore this point, Luo drew on a grim catalog of historical episodes, including accounts of cannibalism during sieges and famine, to convey the urgency of such knowledge.[iii] In response, he assembled a diverse range of recipes from pharmacopeias, medical texts, and agriculture manuals, offering practical strategies for preserving food, reducing consumption, identifying substitutes, and finding safe drinking water.

The first group of recipes, all titled “Method for Avoiding Grain and Preventing Hunger During Military Marches,” offers strategies for reducing food intake while sustaining the body during prolonged periods of deprivation. One of them reads:

Astragalus root (huangqi), 3 qian (approximately 11.19g)

Red halloysite clay (chi shizhi), 3 qian

Dragon bone (fossilized bone), 3 qian

Siler root (fangfeng), 5 fen (approximately 1.9g)

Processed aconite root (wutou), 1 qian (approximately 3.73g)

Roast [the ingredients] until dry, then pound in a stone mortar one thousand times. Refine [the resulting powder] with honey to form bullet-sized pills. When traveling urgently with no time to prepare food, eat a full meal of rice beforehand, then take one pill to sustain a journey of 500 li (approximately 165 miles). Two pills will keep you going for 1,000 li.[iv]

For readers who found the ingredients in this recipe uncommon or difficult to obtain, the manual offers more accessible alternatives. One recipe, for instance, recommends steaming asplenium trichomanes (tiejiao fengwei cao; literally, iron-foot phoenix-tail grass) together with black beans. Eating five to seven of these infused beans is said to keep hunger at bay for an entire day.[v]

Fig. 2. Asplenium trichomanes from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé;s Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond simply reducing food intake, some recipes go further by offering ways to transform inedible materials into food. One recipe, quoted from the renowned pharmacopeia Ben cao gang mu (Systematic Materia Medica), describes how to render rock edible:

Gather white stones from mountain streams, and boil them in juice from scallions or with the root of sanguisorba officinalis (diyu). Once cooked, they become as soft as taro and can serve as a hunger remedy. This is called “stone soup” (shigeng).[vi]

Likely originating in Daoist texts, “stone stops” carried cultural weight in literati writings and poetry as part of the cuisines of transcendence. While Daoist sources emphasized absorbing the qi of stones produced through this cooking method, Luo’s inclusion of this recipe highlights its practical utility rather than its association with longevity-inducing nourishment found in other texts. [vii]

Food poisoning was another major concern addressed in the treatise. As Luo noted, there are cases where troops suffered from consuming poor food, resulting in swelling, shortness of breath, and death. In the “Rescue and Relief” section, therefore, he gathered guidance on identifying toxic plants and animals, as well as detecting contaminated water and spoiled fruits. He warned that if a dead animal’s mouth remains closed, its liver appears dark, or its flesh is marked with black spots, the meat should not be consumed.[viii] In this part of the collection, the focus shifts from treating the ill to equipping readers with the knowledge to avoid contaminated food in the first place.

Luo Shiyao’s effort to compile practical knowledge parallels the work of late Ming scholars who sought to collect and classify natural objects, as Benjamin Elman has discussed. Amid the twin crises of warfare and illness, Luo’s manual offered not only remedies but also a structure for navigating chaos, something tangible readers could hold onto. By using recipes, Luo drew on what Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata have identified as the strengths of medical formulars in transmitting knowledge: their modularity and experiential basis made them easy to adapt and share.[ix] Yet such recipes typically required learned physicians to turn a generic formula into a specific prescription. Luo’s collection attempted to break from that model. His emphasis on expediency—on accessibility, broad applicability, and consistent outcomes—shifted the power of care from professional practices to ordinary individuals. It was a solitary act of hope, an effort to make order out of chaos, and to leave behind something enduring when so much had already been lost.

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[i] The author did not specify the types of illnesses he had experience in the preface. However, based on the section “Curing Illnesses,” the compilation addresses various conditions such as coughing, colds, diarrhea, headaches, toothaches, lower back pain, as well as ulcers and skin diseases.

[ii] Luo Shiyao羅世瑤, Xingjun fangbian bianfang 行军方便便方Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852), Preface, 1a.

[iii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Preface, 1b.

[iv] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[v] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[vi] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[vii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[viii] One of the example could be found in Lin Hong 林洪 (1127-1279), “Bai shigeng” 白石羹 (White Stone Stop), in Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling, https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%85%E4%BE%9B.

[ix] Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 20. https://doi.org/10.1086/691411.

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Chang Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research interests cover the global history of medicine, the history of military technologies, and the interconnections between human and non-human bodies. She is currently working on a monograph derived from her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis, which examines medical practices in military organizations during the Qing’s territorial expansion.

Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique

By Kathleen Sheldon

 In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, after a decade-long liberation struggle. But neighboring South Africa, then under the white-supremacist apartheid regime, funded and supplied weapons to organizations that were anti-socialist or otherwise opposed to Mozambique’s government. By the early 1980s conditions deteriorated as that internal war expanded.[i] Beira, the port city where we lived, suffered from repeated electrical power losses due to sabotage and increasing problems in obtaining food. Devastation in the country as a whole was extreme.[ii]

A colourful book cover of the author's memoir
Fig. 1. Cover of The Mackerel Years, the memoir by the author.

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Access to food was problematic. Most of the shops posted signs in their windows warning, “There is no salt, meat, bread,” sometimes listing a dozen items that were not available. We marveled at the rows of empty shelves, as even so-called supermarkets had only half a shelf of rough gray toilet paper and nothing else. The open-air markets displayed little or no fresh items. If tomatoes or oranges arrived at a shop, boisterous lines would materialize, and the food would quickly run out. The local dollar shop, where we could use foreign currency to buy imported items, had very limited supplies, though we appreciated delicacies like Hero jam from Switzerland. Even Spam, which we had avoided at home in the U.S., proved to be a tasty treat.

When we first arrived, we noticed that a tea shop on the ground floor of our five-story apartment building was closed and dark, though tables and chairs were visible inside. As we stopped to peer through the large dirty windows, a friend told us, “This shop used to serve nice little rolls and tea, up until a few months ago.” “Oh good,” I responded optimistically, “Maybe we’ll be able to buy some bread here.” The tea shop never opened while we were there, though it did occasionally act as a bakery and sell bread rolls, with people lining up around the block to buy a bagful.

I eventually discovered a recipe for a quick-rising yeast bread in a small pamphlet that I had brought from home, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls from the Culinary Arts Institute.[iii]

A loaf cake sites on a yellow platter topped with glazed fruit.
Fig. 2. Cover of 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession.

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Casserole Bread Batter Method

1 cup milk

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons shortening

1 cup warm (not hot) water

2 packages or cakes yeast, active dry or compressed

4½ cups sifted flour

Scald milk; stir in sugar, salt and shortening. Cool to lukewarm. Measure the warm water into a bowl. (Use lukewarm water for compressed yeast). Sprinkle or crumble in the yeast. Stir until softened. Blend in the lukewarm milk mixture. Add flour and stir until well blended, about 2 minutes. Cover; let rise in warm place free from drafts about 40 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Stir batter down. Beat vigorously about ½ minute. Turn into greased 1½-quart casserole. An 8x8x2-inch square pan may be used. Bake uncovered at 375o F. about 1 hour. Makes 1 loaf.

A page of text includes recipes for various breads with yeast, with an accompanying image of bread
Fig. 3. Recipe page from 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession. Original publisher no longer exists and cannot be contacted for permission.

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Since it could be baked in an eight-inch square pan, I could use our 220-volt toaster oven that we had purchased in Los Angeles before leaving, which was more reliable than the propane gas oven installed in the kitchen. I developed a routine to fit the bread-baking into the on-and-off pattern of our electric power. When the power came on, I would immediately mix up a batch of dough, which then needed less than an hour to rise before baking. I would then beat it down, put it into the pan, and get it into the oven while we still had electricity. Even if we only had three or four hours of power every other day, I could make enough bread to last us for two or three days.

The other constraint was the erratic supply of flour. Once or twice my husband’s co-workers arranged to buy fifty-kilogram sacks and divide the flour among our group. Getting milk was also a group endeavor. We bought it in bulk through a special arrangement from a local dairy. It was delivered to our building in ten-gallon metal milk cans, shared out among our friends, and then we each boiled our share before using it.

That bread became a staple part of our diet. We usually ate it for breakfast, sliced in small squares and spread with White Rhino peanut butter that friends brought back from shopping trips to Zimbabwe or South Africa.

A white rhinoceros features in the center of black text with a red border.
Fig. 4. Label from White Rhino peanut butter, ca. 1983, in author’s possession. Image credit: Kathleen Sheldon.

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In more recent years when I met with a group of friends to discuss a draft of my memoir, one of them baked this bread for our gathering. Baking that bread during the difficult years of living with conflict had felt like a clever, necessary accomplishment, and I had not made it myself since our return to the U.S. My friend’s offering was the first time I had eaten it in forty years, and it was still a good sturdy bread that tasted wonderful with butter and peanut butter.

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[i] Two sources that focus on that conflict are: William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War Against the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

[ii] I have written about that experience in The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique. This essay shares one story about how we coped.

[iii] Culinary Arts Institute, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1965). It is out of print, but available at Amazon and EBay. For more information on Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, see Terri Griffith’s blog, 250 Potato Possibilities.


Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar of African women’s history. Her previous books include African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002), and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2d ed. (2016). She has also published dozens of articles in journals and edited collections and contributed as an author and editor to many reference works. She has just completed ten years on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. She is a founding editor of H-Luso-Africa, an online network about Portuguese-speaking Africa.

“Like the Genuine Moca”: Ersatz Coffee and Confederate Nationalism during the American Civil War

By Anne Sarah Rubin

Coffee, I must have coffee,
and if anyone wants to give me a treat,
ah!, just give me some coffee!

Although written by J.S. Bach and the librettist Picander in the 1730s, the Coffee Cantata’s homage to the world’s favorite stimulant certainly rang true in the Civil War South. Recipes for coffee substitutes pepper the pages of Confederate newspapers and reminiscences. Elite white women wrote down their personal formulas and debated the virtues of one concoction over another, while scientists weighed in on the chemical composition of different tinctures. Coffee, because it was entirely imported, was one of the first commodities affected by the Union blockade of Southern ports.[i] Doing without coffee, or cheerfully drinking an ersatz variety, became a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, like wearing homespun or a palmetto hat.

“Good Coffee Sweet Potatoes” reads the heading handwritten on the back of a Confederate $100 bond. We can imagine the writer, probably Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, at her home in Charleston during the war, following the steps she carefully enumerated. More likely it was one of the three Black women the DeSaussures enslaved who did the work: first peeling the sweet potatoes, and slicing them into strips, 3/8 or ½ inch thick, then cutting the strips “into squares so as to average the same size.” The squares then had to “dry in the sun three days,” before they could be bagged up. The final step was to “parch a good brown, grind and make as you would coffee berry.”[ii]

A group of Black freedpeople stand, with hoes, over a field of sweet potatoes. Another group sits on the ground beside them, sorting the crop.
Fig. 1. Freedpeople planting sweet potatoes on the Hopkinson plantation, Edisto Island, SC, April, 1862. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010651644/

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In fact, Confederates turned to almost anything that could be burned, ground, and steeped to make a bitter brown liquid. Some, like rye or chicory are still used today; others, like okra seed, acorns, cotton seeds, or sorghum fell by the wayside after the war. Each had their champion. “To see the earnest face with which each lady discussed her own particular mixture, and her great delight when some courteous old gentleman smacked his lips, and declared, he ‘had not tasted anything so like the genuine moca [sic.] for years, Madam,’ was most edifying,” recalled one Confederate matron.[iii]

An etching depicts a white woman in voluminous dress kneeling and praying in an outfitted cave
Fig. 2. This depiction of a white Southern woman living in a cave during the siege of Vicksburg prominently displays her coffeepot, a touch of home in uncomfortable surroundings. Adalbert John Volck, “Cave Life in Vicksburg,” in Confederate War Etchings, Creative Commons image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/421364

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Of course, people could simply have done without. No one ever died for lack of coffee, and the vegetable and grain varieties all lacked caffeine, so they didn’t provide much physical stimulation. In fact, one advocate for acorn coffee noted that he no longer suffered from headaches, not realizing that he was no longer suffering from daily caffeine withdrawal.[iv] Psychologically, though, there was something to the ritual of drinking something hot, brown, and slightly bitter. It represented a moment of normalcy, a chance to offer some hospitality, to warm up, to momentarily forget one’s troubles.

When the war ended, coffee returned to the South. Freedmen’s Bureau and US Army rations (distributed to both Black and white Southerners in the months after the war) sometimes contained rye coffee.[v] Southern cookbooks published after the war trafficked heavily in nostalgia for antebellum abundance and rarely mentioned harder times. Maria Massey Barringer did include a recipe for Blockade Coffee (made of rye) in her 1867 Dixie Cookery, billed as “a practical cook-book for southern housekeepers,” but few other regionalists did the same.[vi] In fact, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book tartly noted that “those who are not particular as to quality, but only want something that looks like coffee” could try “roasted acorns, chick peas, beans, rye, cocoa shells, burned wheat bread, dried and roasted turnip, carrot and dandelion root,” but pointedly did not recommend any of them.[vii] Mentions of ersatz coffee became staples of nostalgic reminiscences, about hardships overcome without interrogating real struggles and hunger. They were given with almost a wink and a laugh—suffering for coffee was funny, actual starvation was not.

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[i] Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront, Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 72-73. Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 14.

[ii] The receipt book was donated to the Museum of the Confederacy by Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, the wife of South Carolina Brigadier General Wilmot Gibbs DeSaussure. It appears to have been compiled sometime after the Civil War. Frances M. Burroughs, “The Confederate Receipt Book: A Study of Food Substitution in the American Civil War,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 1 (n.d.): 31–50. The recipe is on p.6 of the book, pp 44-45 in the article. The number of enslaved people is from the 1860 slave census. Porcher describes sweet potato coffee as “used on several plantations in lower Carolina.” Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, 400.

[iii] “What the Confederates Ate,” by Clara Minor Lynn VHS, 2.

[iv] [No Title], Arkansas True Democrat, January 9, 1862.

[v] Orders for Rations Issued, 1865, Governor Sharkey, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

[vi] Barringer, Dixie Cookery; or, How I Managed My Table for Twelve Years. A Practical Cook-Book for Southern Housekeepers (Boston, 1867), 108.

[vii] M. E. Porter, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book and Companion for Frugal and Economical Housekeepers (John E. Potter & Company, 1871), 379.

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Anne Sarah Rubin is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was the 2016-2017 Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She was also the Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center from 2017-2020. Her most recent book is the co-edited memoir, The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Dr. Rubin’s first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy (UNC, 2005), received the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the most original book on the Civil War era. Her study of the place of Sherman’s March in American culture and history, entitled Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March in American Memory was published in September 2014 by UNC Press. The project also has a multimedia component, which can be found at http://www.shermansmarch.org. She is currently working on a project called A Mouthful of Nothing: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1860-1868.