Food critic John Hess and food historian Karen Hess have commented that the "quality and richness" of the dishes "should surprise those who believe that Americans of those days ate only Spartan frontier food", giving as examples the glass of Malaga wine, seven eggs and half a pound of butter in the pumpkin pie. They argue that while the elaborate bills of fare given for each month of the year in American editions were conspicuously wasteful, they were less so than the "interminable" menus "stuffed down" in the Victorian era, as guests were not expected to eat everything, but to choose which dishes they wanted, and "the cooking was demonstrably better in the eighteenth century."