My wife enjoys the costumed pageantry of period dramas. One of her latest obsessions is The Gilded Age, an HBO series set among the upper crust in 1880s New York City. Given that and her love of cooking, I could hardly resist getting her a copy of Becky Libourel Diamond's The Gilded Age Cookbook: Recipes & Stories from America's Golden Era 1868-1900.

Rifle through the pages and prepare to salivate at some of these recipes! Crown roast of lamb with mint sauce. Bermuda potatoes with parsley sauce. Lobster fricassee. Salmon en papillotes. Queenie's cornmeal potato muffins. Rabbit, hunter style. Pommes de terre a la Brabant. Dolly Varden cake. Fish house punch.

I could go on, but it's more than an hour 'til dinner time and this is making me hungry.

Some of these recipes are for the experienced culinary artist, one who knows his or her way around a kitchen. But some look fairly simple, even for a novice chef such as myself. I honestly can't wait to try some of these, although I'll leave the more ambitious dishes for my wife, who studied culinary arts and knows what she's doing.

Bear in mind, Diamond has tailored her instructions for a modern chef. For her Meringues a la Creme, for instance, she tells you to use an electric mixer -- hardly common in a Gilded Age kitchen.

As a recipe book, this one gets a mark against it for its fine hardback presentation. It looks nice on a bookshelf and it feels substantial when you're paging through it, but just try to lay it on a kitchen counter long enough to try out one of Diamond's concoctions without it closing on you.

It gets a few checks in the plus column for the overall design, however. This is a hefty book, one that feels solid in your hands.

And it's not just a cookbook, either. Diamond provides brief historical tidbits with each recipe but, more than that, she fills the book with ample history lessons and culinary anecdotes to whet the reader's appetite for Gilded Age cuisine. Prepare to learn everything from how to pack a picnic basket to the proper routine of oyster roasts and clambakes. Read how uneducated servants led to a need for culinary reform. Discover the true difference between hot chocolate and hot cocoa, which were not at the time interchangeable terms. Drool over typical holiday menus. And so on.

I didn't count pages, but it looks like more ink is devoted to history and culture rather than recipes, but there's still a pleasant mix of each -- and certainly there are ample things to try in the kitchen.

This is an excellent cookbook for a highly specific reading audience. I am quite eager to see what comes out of our kitchen with The Gilded Age Cookbook in hand.