This compilation of contemporary Civil War advice for home and farm is an excellent source of information on how the South "made do" during those hard times.

While Mary Elizabeth Massey's "Ersatz in the Confederacy," republished in the last few years by the University of South Carolina Press, is a worthwhile history of home life during those times, "The Confederate Housewife" goes further by quoting the exact recipes and nuggets of advice that appeared in newspapers and periodicals like "Field and Fireside," "Southern Cultivator" and "Clarke's Confederate Household Almanac."

Reading these pages is like going back in time, when advice is needed to restore tainted meat ("take it out of the pickle. Wash so as to cleanse it of the offensive pickle . . . As you re-pack your pieces, it would be well to rub each piece with salt."), get rid of mosquitoes ("put a couple of generous pieces of beef on plates near your bed at night, and you will sleep untroubled by these pests.") or dealing with bloated cattle ("a dose of thoroughwort with a little tansey will afford immediately relief.")

If nothing else, it will make you grateful for indoor plumbing, air conditioning and refrigerators.

You don't know how good you have it until you read about how bad things can get. Boy those Civil War belles had to work from sunrise to sunset just to get a couple of potatoes on the table. This book was really fascinating and puts the War into real perspective in a way that no other book has done. A wonderful recipe book too!.

A friend of mine gave me this book as a gift. Looking at it, I thought, the civil war? It's not a subject I have any great interest in. However, I found Southern Homefront to be extremely interesting, especially the role of women on the homefront: how they made do with few supplies, what kind of war work they did, and how many took charge when their husbands were away. Highly amusing were the "scadalous" things that went on among Charleston's young people--some were actually waltzing, allowing their bodies to touch, instead of square dancing!

Also in Charleston, some ladies were apparently shocked that free black women would dare to take their carriages out during the day. I find such stories funny now, but imagine what it must have been like then.

Especially interesting is the first chapter of the book, which is mostly diary entries and letters of people on the homefront. It is difficult to imagine today what those people must have gone through. What was incredibly fascinating to me, and carries on as a theme throughout the book, was the suggestion that the apathy of the southerners was, in part, why the war was lost. It seems from the information presented that southerners started off the war gung-ho, but quickly lost their enthusiasm and their will to fight. Desertion, the exemption that if you owned 20 slaves you didn't have to fight, and the habit of buying substitutes were rampant problems.

From what I've written, Southern Homefront sounds like a history lesson, but it was really very readable and quite interesting. I encourage anyone, especially people like me who don't really care much about the war, to read this book. Fascinating.

A fascinating account of one of Australia's most colourful and controversial sons.