Treasures from My Mother's Kitchen

It is unfortunate that I don't listen to books on CD. Over the past five days I spent about 20 hours in the car driving to and from and around North Carolina for my dear Aunt Polly's funeral and to visit with family. 

That is a lot of hours spent alone on the road, but someone reading to me puts me to sleep which is not a good condition to be in while barreling down the road at 70 miles an hour. It may be January before I can unclench my jaw!

While staying with my brother in Charlotte, I did get a chance to take a look at his bookshelves. I deemed them pitiful. This just means that there wasn't a book on them that I felt compelled to pull down and look at. And the books were shelved helter-skelter. I longed to tidy them up a bit but kept my hands and my opinions to myself. 

I did come away from this visit with a couple of treasures, though. Somehow, dear Brother ended up with two of our mother's cookbooks and one of our grandmother's. He decided it was time for them to be in my possession, so I brought home The American Woman's Cookbook (1940), The Joy of Cooking (1946) and the deluxe, eighteenth printing of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (1948).

The two that were Mom's are stuffed with handwritten recipes as well as now yellowed ones from newspapers and magazines. In my very brief look at some of these I also spotted assorted recipe pamphlets - one from Sealtest Dairy which is no longer in business and another tract claiming "250 Ways to Cook Meat."

It amused my brother and me that we didn't recognize any of the dishes as having ever made it to our dinner table. Mom was a better collector of recipes than cooker of recipes. 

It wasn't that she was a bad cook, more like a disinterested cook. She had other activities in her life that held her passion. This was a woman with a college degree in Home Economics although that field of study encompassed more than just whipping up cakes and casseroles. Even if she wasn't a gourmet cook, the family dinners were always quite nutritionally balanced.

I fear I may have inherited the disinterested gene, although I do seem to be on a roll with recipes from another era, most recently The Historic Kentucky Kitchen (which I wrote about here).

My grandmother's cookbook seems to be a repository not only for random recipes but also personal correspondence. There was even a blank check drawn on a local bank tucked in between its pages. 

It will be fun to sort through these cookbooks and see what is to be found. I am sure there are surprises in store. Perhaps the bounty of one or two of the recipes will eventually wind up on my dinner table. 

The Historic Kentucky Kitchen

Handwritten recipe for Logan English's Zucchini and Eggs* 

The event Monday night with Deidre A. Scaggs, author of The Historic Kentucky Kitchen:Traditional Recipes for Today's Cook was quite entertaining...and delicious. Ms. Scaggs began by telling the 100 or so people in attendance that she had fond memories of growing up in a small Kentucky town and eating her grandmother's cooking. She inherited her grandmother's cast iron skillet and uses it today. Her father was the other cook in her life and he still fixes her breakfast when she visits him. He is the 'egg sandwich expert' mentioned in the book's dedication.

She had some funny stories about trying to modernize the handwritten recipes that she discovered in the archives of the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections where she serves as associate dean. Many times she had to figure out that the measurement for 'butter the size of a hen's egg' equaled 3 to 4 tablespoons and that '1 tumbler full' and '1 coffee cup full' each equal about 8 fluid ounces.

When it came time to try out Mary M. Peter's Hickory Nut Cake (1889), she discovered that hickories were a hard nut to crack. She ordered them and was frustrated when they arrived in their shells. No amount of pounding would crack the shells until she finally wrapped them in a tea towel and beat them with her grandmother's iron skillet. Then she had to spend time separating the nutmeats from the shell pieces and barely had the one cup of nuts that the recipe called for. 

Lesson learned: when ordering hickory nuts be sure to specify 'shelled'. 

One of her failures involved the White Mountain Cake. Ms. Scaggs tried all sorts of ways to make and bake this vintage dessert - to no avail. Therefore, it never made it into the book. I found a recipe for the cake in one of my mother's cookbooks from the 1940s and I will send it to Ms. Scaggs. Perhaps it will help.

Out of two hundred recipes that were discovered, adapted to today's measurements and oven temperatures, and taste-tested only 100 of them made it into the book. 

The cookbook also contains biographical sketches of the Kentucky women and their families whose recipes were discovered and converted which makes it part cookbook, part history book, and part collection of Southern classics - fried chicken, pound cake, mayonnaise, egg nog, and mint tea. 

Ms. Scaggs thoughtfully brought her own refreshments, the recipes for which were taken from the cookbook. There was Frances Jewell McVey's Spiced Tea (1920s) which I did not imbibe and Seaton Family's Buttermilk Cake (1880s) which of course, as I love cake,  I had to eat. It was heavenly.

It was a fun evening and now I am ready to tie on my apron and try out some of these recipes.

*There was a note in the book that this zucchini and egg recipe was difficult to decipher as it didn't specify how to cook the eggs - poached or hard-boiled?. She decided to poach the eggs and the rest of the ingredients were treated as a salad to sit under them. I could do without the anchovies!

Books from the Book Fair

I must admit I suffered a bit of sticker shock when I checked out with the cashier at the Kentucky Book Fair yesterday. Three books: $68.78.

For someone who enjoys shopping and buying at used books stores, paying new book prices is quite a leap, but I am comfortable with my choices: a cookery, a mystery, and a history. Plus I had a blast seeing and talking with many authors even though I didn't always buy their books.

The Cookery
I certainly wouldn't consider myself a cook - not by a long shot - but I was fascinated with The Historic Kentucky Kitchen: Traditional Recipes for Today's Cook. It contains more than a hundred recipes from the nineteenth and early twentieth century that were taken from handwritten diaries and journals, scrapbooks, and out-of-print cookbooks. They were collected, modernized a bit, and taste tested by Deidre A. Scaggs who is with the University of Kentucky Libraries of Special Collections and Andrew W. McGraw, chef at the County Club restaurant in Lexington. Together they searched the Special Collections for recipes that everyday people would use.

So you have recipes for Lucy Hayes Breckinridge's Corn Soup, early 1900s; Frances Jewel McVey's Pumpkin Pie, circa 1920s; and Nanny Clay McDowell's Egg Nog, 1882. Copies of the original handwritten lists of ingredients and cooking instructions are included in the book.

As part of my book cataloging project, I just came across - tucked in a cookbook of my mother's - a few handwritten recipes of my grandmother's. One for fruit cake. No cooking instructions - she knew those by heart - just the list of ingredients. These family gems were on my mind when I saw this book.

As a value-added piece, the authors are speaking tomorrow night at an event at the local historical society and I plan to attend. Although I met and spoke with Ms. Scaggs, I will look forward to hearing some cooking tips from Chef McGraw.

The Mystery
This crime novel takes place in London, England - always a favorite location of mine. Fictional mystery writer Sebastian McCabe, his friend Jeff Cody, and Cody's wife, journalist Lynda Teal, are all swept up in solving The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore. Mr. Phillimore is an investment banker and member of the Sherlock Holmes Society. It looks to be great fun. Author Dan Andriacco told me that this was the fourth in his series that rely on Holmes-like investigations. I don't usually start in the middle of a series, but I was attracted to the London location and the Holmes connection. 

The History
Louisville and The Civil War takes a look at the role my hometown played during that conflict. Author Bryan S. Bush is a local historian and lecturer. He has participated as a Confederate artillery soldier in many reenactment events and he attended the Book Fair in uniform. He was quite an interesting character and I am always looking for ways to find out more about my city's history.

So those are the books. Tomorrow I will share with you the faces of the authors I met.