Cookbooks: Kitchen lore in condensed form

Halfway between my college years and spinsterhood, my mother and aunt pooled their collective kitchen knowledge together in a book of family recipes, gifted to me in a burgundy, leather-bound photo album, filled with four-by-six recipe guides. 

Some were typed, and some were cherished, handwritten artifacts like those time-honored recipes scrawled in my Grandma Leone’s shaky cursive. She died in 1996, but when I see her handwriting, I at once hear her voice, which quivered like her pen.

I recall her no-nonsense scowl, and I can almost detect the scent of her homemade dresses, as well. The woman never wore pants, the lone exception being when she worked her gardens in a pair of denim overalls.

My homemade cookbook is so much more than an instruction manual. It preserves my family’s traditions. 

The Basics—and Beyond

Most cookbooks feature typical categories of food, cleverly titled or not—the appetizers, the breads, vegetable dishes, meat dishes and other entrees, desserts, and so on. Sections on cooking and cleaning tips, quantities for serving a large number of people, and conversions and substitutions also are common. And then there are the deviations, the additions, the unique ways each family, each church, each woman’s club makes the book its own—from stories and jokes to pictures and quotes.

Elaine Maisner is senior executive editor and acquiring editor for cookbooks at The University of North Carolina Press. 

“While a variety of non-recipe material is found in cookbooks these days, some of the most interesting and most popular additional sorts of information tend to be, in UNC Press cookbooks, personal food histories and family stories related to food experiences,” Elaine said. “In our books, you will see wonderful cooks regaling readers with stories both humorous and poignant about how a particular dish came to be, or how a seasonal food was celebrated within a family’s or community’s life. Also, in my experience, cookbooks today may often feature a lot more information about the cultivation and best-practice procuring of foodstuffs, compared to cookbooks of the past.”

The Bride’s Cook Book, published by West Virginia’s Rose City Press in 1934, contains a page on “Invalid Cookery,” which provides tips on cooking for the infirm. Food for the sick, the book advises, can be classified in four ways: liquid diet (broths and soups), soft diet (eggs and custards), soft-solid diet (tender chicken, gelatin dishes) and “special diet,” which is one ordered specifically by a doctor. The author suggests that serving the patient’s favorite dishes in “an especially attractive manner” will aid in stimulating the appetite: “The tray for the invalid should be carefully arranged—always dainty and attractive. The dishes and the linen used should be the best in the house. A single flower or even a cluster of leaves often makes the tray attractive. If the contents of the tray can be sent into the sick room as a surprise it will often tempt the appetite of the patient who otherwise might not eat if he knew what was coming.”

Several recipes for wine are featured in The Wytheville (Va.) Cook Book, compiled and edited for a Baptist Church benefit in 1932. Among them is dandelion wine, produced with four quarts of dandelion blossoms (those dastardly weeds my grandma diligently plucked from her yard), water, oranges, lemons, and sugar. And there’s advice on keeping eggs fresh: “three gallons water, one pint lime, one or two pints salt, wash eggs and drop in fresh. Will keep indefinitely.”

Plenty of humor finds its way into these collections. In the 2001 cookbook of the Kingsport, Tenn., Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, wedged between recipes for cakes and casseroles, is a prescription for Elephant Stew. “One elephant, two rabbits (optional), and salt and pepper to taste,” it directs. “Cut elephant into bite-sized pieces. This should take about two months. Add enough gravy to cover. Cook over kerosene fire for about four weeks at 450 degrees. This will serve 3,000 people.”

The Steelesburg Extension Homemakers Club of Blacksburg, Va., incorporated a second hobby, quilting, in its Appalachian Heritage Cookbook. “Our club is best known for two abilities: cooking and quilt making,” the club members explain, and on each section’s cover page is a pattern for a quilt square, including the Rolling Stone, Bow Tie, Rocky Road, Water Wheel and Flying Geese.

Some sprinkle inspirational quotes, cheerful poems, and scripture in the forewords and throughout. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred,” writes the pastor of the Fountain City United Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., in the 1975 Bazaar Cookbook. In its foreword, The Wytheville Cook Book refers to itself, rather eloquently, as a “choice collection of kitchen lore in condensed form.”

The Cooks

To view the rows and rows of cookbooks archived on the shelves of the Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University, it would seem no organization is immune to the urge to impart its collective culinary wisdom with the world. Families compile them as Christmas gifts; churches, school groups, and service organizations sell them as a fundraiser for special projects. There are cookbooks from homemakers’ clubs, Boy Scout troops, college clubs, fall festival committees, a local Republican Party, inns, banks, restaurants, and many others.

For its inventory, UNC Press selects proposed books that connect well with others in its collection and that have the potential to attract a large audience, Maisner said.

“Our main, time-honored interests are in books that connect to the food cultures of the American South,” she said. Maisner notes that “farm-to-table cookbooks are very popular right now, and naturally publication in the spring season is advisable, so that readers can plan for the growing season. We are also seeing increased popularity of single-subject cookbooks.” UNC Press is following that trend with its own “Savor the South” cookbooks series, with volumes including Biscuits, Buttermilk, Bourbon, Tomatoes, and more of the South’s favorite foods.

The Mississippi-based Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. SFA’s sixth-volume Cornbread Nation series is a compilation of Southern food writing, while the Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, with plastic comb binding, is ready to go to work in the kitchen. “We put out a call…to get recipes from the mountains to the Gulf Coast. We were looking at a diversity of dishes and of contributors when we put that together,” said Managing Editor Sara Camp Arnold. “We wanted things that a home cook could make.” Arnold said there are two types of cookbooks—those that are fun to read and flip through pictures as part of an imaginary experience, “but you’re not necessarily going to cook everything,” and those with less focus on visuals and more focus on use. Community Cookbook belongs to the latter group, she said. And, all of the recipes were tested, so “you know the recipes are going to work,” she said.

Mildred Howell Thomason’s work on her church’s cookbook committee evidently was a source of immortal pride, as it merited a mention in her May 2012 obituary. “Another of her most accomplished activities included being co-chairman of the Bethel Cookbook Committee; the cookbook Better ‘n Love was so successful that it went into several printings,” read the obit of the Union, S.C., native.

When the members of the Second Presbyterian Church of Roanoke, Va., realized their congregation had never published a cookbook, “we just decided that it was time that we had one,” said Kathy Gilchrist, co-chair of the Second Serving Cookbook Committee. Tying the book together from front to back are works by the congregation’s talented photographers and artists, including an ink and watercolor painting of the church exterior by Eric Fitzpatrick commissioned especially for the cover. Church members’ glossy photographs of the church’s ornate architectural features adorn the dividers for each section, and many recipes come with a personal note from its submitter: “My go-to recipe for the fall” or “My favorite as a child.” The deviled eggs recipe from Gerald Carter elicits a chuckle, as it seems the cook was a wee bit hesitant about sharing his famous formula. He dutifully coughs up the ingredients, but with “no exact measurements, because Gerald doesn’t want anyone to outdo HIS deviled eggs!” the recipe states. “Don’t expect them to taste as good as mine the first time,” Gerald adds. “You will get the right touch with the additions after several years.”

“We wanted it to be more than just a cookbook. This cookbook for us is just beautiful—I sat down for two hours and read it from front to back,” Gilchrist said. “Hopefully, if someone wants to join our church, they could see what we were about by reading the book.” The book has raised about $15,000 for the church’s Presbyterian Community Center.

Judy Fannin of Ashland, Ky., describes herself as “not a great cook, but an innovative cook.” Fannin said she honed her skills as a hostess of supper clubs and themed dinner parties. “When all of us were young couples in Ashland, we didn’t have any very good restaurants,” she said. “The reason I think so many of our friends are such good cooks and entertain so beautifully is we had to entertain each other for years.”

She and her husband owned about fifteen Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants until they sold them a decade ago, and the retirees now spend winters in Nokomis, Fla. Fannin penned a letter to some 300 friends and family members in January 2001, inviting them to submit recipes for the book by mid-March. “Not known for procrastination, recently unemployed, and sometimes real bored, I’ve found a project!” she declared. 

What was supposed to be a Christmas gift for family and friends became quite the undertaking and resulted in selling thousands of spiral-bound, inch-thick volumes—with a second edition of Fannin Family and Friends Favorite Foods: Often Fabulous! Always Fun! spread over two books. All told, the three books contain 2,200 recipes, and Fannin is now in her seventeenth or eighteenth printing.  

“It’s just taken off,” Fannin said. “I don’t make any money off mine—it costs more to publish. I’m not in it for that.”

Fannin said she wrote 225 of her own recipes based on her own combinations from hundreds of cookbooks over the years. Some required a little kitchen testing before being put to paper: “The year I wrote all my recipes, I gained like twenty pounds that year,” she laughed. 

The Cookbook as History

Embeded throughout cookbooks’ recipes and narratives are telltale hints of sociological, technological, economical and cultural history.

The Kanawha County clerk in West Virginia, for example, saw fit to equip new housewives with a copy of The Bride’s Cook Book. “Through the courtesy of Mr. J.M. Slack, our county clerk, this book is handed, without obligation, to you on your wedding day. We sincerely hope that in it you will find many valuable helps for cooking and your housework,” states a page at the front featuring Mr. Slack’s photo. Inside the front cover of this particular copy belonging to the Appalachian Collection, the handwritten inscription reads, “Maude Stafford, June 8, 1934—Now learn how to cook!” And nearly all of the women credited with submitting recipes to The Wytheville Cook Book are identified by their husbands’ names—Mrs. M.G. Robinson, Mrs. Geo. H. Miles, Mrs. C. Albert Myers.

Bound with string, the sixty-five-cent Cook Book thanks the businessmen of Wytheville for responding “so generously in giving advertisements, thereby enabling us to sell the book at about one-half its real value.” Advertisements are dispersed throughout the book, suggesting early usage of product placement. Nearly all of the bread recipes specifically call for Queen Patent flour, for instance, and yet another common ingredient used in recipes was Knox Gelatin—which just so happened to be featured in one-line ads at the bottom of every page.

As with clothing and hairstyles, some recipes come into and out of fashion over the years. Returning again to The Bride’s Cook Book, a few sandwich suggestions are unique throwbacks—a plain lettuce with salad dressing sandwich, an orange and cream cheese sandwich, a bacon and peanut butter sandwich. Influences from other countries and ethnicities made their way into the cookbooks of the Southern Appalachians as well. Those in search of jellied tongue need only check the Marion (Va.) Cook Book of 1921. The 1995 Appalachian Melungeon Heritage Cookbook includes a number of Melungeon favorites, including fried eel, “a Christmas tradition.”

The 1999 cookbook 150 Years of Watauga County (N.C.) Recipes, compiled in celebration of the county’s sesquicentennial, features recipes from the 1800s taken from a book belonging to a Watauga County Extension Homemakers Club member. Among those authentic recipes are turtle stew, southern liver, roast goose, broiled partridges and quail, venison stew, frogs, and Sally Lunn rolls.

“It was such a cool lesson in a generational-type thing,” Gilchrist said about compiling her church’s cookbook. “We had recipes from women in their 90s, and you could tell when gelatin came to be by the age of the people submitting the recipes. That was just really cool. I like when it tells a story.”

Can’t Find the Words? Say it with Casserole

There’s something about consoling friends and family with casserole, a certain translation of death and loss to green beans and French’s fried onions, tuna and noodles, broccoli and crumbled cheddar crackers.

Whenever someone in our community passed, we would stand in the long receiving lines at the funeral home to shake hands or give a formal hug, and the next day attend the funeral ceremony at the Baptist church and burial at the cemetery. It was then that all the women deployed their casserole dishes and insulated carriers.

“It’s definitely something that’s passed down in Southern families. Everybody needs to eat, whether they feel like cooking or not,” says Sara Camp Arnold, managing editor of the Southern Foodways Alliance. “It’s a way to express care for somebody without having to have the exact right words.”

There would be as many cars as possible parked in the yard, and we’d file into the kitchen, wedging our casseroles and cold salads wherever they would fit between buckets of fried chicken, plates of deli meats, rows of two-liter sodas, fresh pies and pound cakes. With paper plates in hand, we crowded around, standing in clusters or taking a seat on any available surface—sofa arms, the floor, a sturdy end table—and chatting until it seemed an appropriate time to leave. It was the custom of kindness that Will D. Campbell sums up beautifully in the novel Brother to a Dragonfly.

“Somehow in rural Southern culture, food is always the first thought of neighbors when there is trouble,” Campbell writes. “That is something they can do and not feel uncomfortable. It means, ‘I love you. And I am sorry for what you are going through and I will share as much of your burden as I can.’ And maybe potato salad is a better way of saying it.”