Category: Grub Garage
this was sent to me from a friend. It's an article from the June issue of Texas Monthly. For all you cookbook nuts
Critters And Fritters
Vintage cookbooks are among my favorite heirlooms, although you might not
want me to plan a meal with them. Barbecued armadillo, anyone?
WHEN IT COMES TO GOOD COOKING, I am the bad egg of the family. Many of my
meals are unintentionally flambé, and I commit assorted chefly sins-for
example, dumping flour directly from the bag into the bowl. (If my kids
hadn't long ago borrowed the sifter for sandbox duty, it would be in mint
condition today.) In short, my kitchen efforts are recipes for disaster.
It's ironic, then, that I'm the one who inherited dozens of tattered old
cookbooks from amateur chefs on both sides of the family.
Although I've never prepared a single dish from any of these lowbrow
heirlooms, I can't bear to toss them out. I can pick out the best-loved
recipes-not only because I've eaten the final results but also because the
pages appear alarmingly blood-spattered and fly-specked. But as someone who
often forgets to turn off the mixer before lifting the beaters out of the
batter, I know what those spots really are: souvenirs of long-gone biscuits,
pies, and casseroles. So I'm keeping these treasures-dog-ears, broken backs,
and all. Someday, when my sons discover that their late mother collected
dirty books, they can do the tossing for me.
Vintage Texas cookbooks are just a whole lot of fun. Even the earliest
contain continental classics like chicken marengo and crêpes suzette-as if
the nearest general store stocked white wine and curaçao alongside the
calico and seed corn-as well as shuddery concoctions such as whey punch,
liver-onion patties, and parsnip fritters. I love to flip through them and
puzzle over forgotten words like "marlow" (fancy custard) and "Cottolene" (a
shortening much favored in Texas because it came from cottonseed). A short
sentence or two could mean a day's work: "Select a 4-weeks' old little pig.
Clean and scald." Some cultural references completely escape me-one quote
that launches a cookbook's pastry section reads "What a time the monster is
cutting up the cake"-and the factual errors can crack me up. A confused
homemaker clearly thought mangoes and muskmelons were the same fruit; an
assertively Texan cookbook touts "Gov. Phelps' Egg Nog"-but we never had a
Governor Phelps; and one beef-eater, obviously unfamiliar with Louisiana
cuisine, donated a recipe for "filet gumbo." The stilted language provides
more cheap laughs: for instance, "Dress the turkey yourself" (in a widdle
hat and coat?) and the Hannibal Lecterish directive "Wash and trim one
medium-sized heart." But the era had its blinders, and some things aren't
funny. A recipe for a dessert combining "macaroons, nuts, and a 35¢ bottle
of cherries" is labeled "Jew Pudding," and some troglodyte slopped together
ground beef, spaghetti, mushrooms, and corn and dubbed the result "Dago's
Delight."
There's another reason I love old cookbooks. Just as today's food
literature-chichi, glossy, even lascivious-reflects modern life, so do the
modest little volumes of yesteryear preserve the mundane details of a
vanished society. The chief ingredients of cookbooks today are alluring
photos and enticing words ("pomegranate salsa," "lemongrass-cream nage"). In
the past, when books of any kind were precious and rare, a typical cooking
guide was set in teeny type with few illustrations. It likely
included-besides "receipts" for everything from oyster bisque to pecan
brittle-medical advice, gardening tips, and mawkish homilies. Even back
then, advertisements subsidized printing costs, and they are earnest if
often bewildering. ("Dr. Hughes' Grape Baking Powder"? Please tell me it
wasn't flavored.) Best of all are the household hints, dozens of which fill
the back of most manuals. Here's an 1883 suggestion for sweeping a carpet:
"Rub and wash four large potatoes, put them in a chopping-bowl and chop into
pieces the size of a pea, sprinkle them over the floor, brush well over the
carpet with your broom, then sweep thoroughly." Alas, there is no subsequent
tip titled "Cleaning Spud Schmutz From Rugs."
One of my favorite family hand-me-downs is the Matagorda Cook Book, a joint
effort by that town's Methodist churchwomen 95 years ago. I spent part of
every childhood summer in Matagorda with my maternal grandparents, he a
dedicated hunter and fisherman who set out many Saturday mornings to catch
or shoot dinner and she a renowned cook who jumped up to heat a skilletful
of Crisco as soon as she heard him pull into the driveway. She was also game
for whipping up any dessert, anytime (her dewberry cobbler!). Mimi, as I
called her, was a cookbook junkie, though she frequently rejiggered recipes
("increase sugar to 2 1/2 cups") and penciled commentary into the margins
("delicious toasted!"). She and the Matagorda Cook Book faithfully hewed to
the same cooking commandments, the first of which might have been "For hot
seafood dishes thou shalt ladle on the pork fat or the butter, and in cold
ones spare not the mayonnaise." I'm also fond of Mimi's bilingual copy of
Memorial Book and Recipes, issued in 1957 by the Czech Catholic Home for the
Aged in tiny Hillje, near El Campo. It contains nine versions of kolaches,
some of which are simply terrifying (no recipe should contain a sentence
beginning "Next morning . . . "). Some of the hints, such as "Old felt hats
make attractive hot pads for the table," would haunt Heloise.
On my father's side, Aunt Ina ruled the range. She had a food sense that was
partly innate and partly acquired from decades spent assembling massive noon
meals for the hands on the family farm. She could turn a fat, squawking hen
into hot fried chicken in 45 minutes flat. I never saw Aunt Ina use a
cookbook, but after she died, one surfaced among her things. It's a homemade
paperback, dated 1966 and titled Gressett Grub (the Gressetts were her
mother's clan). I value this booklet for its two shocking post-childhood
revelations: First, blood relatives I loved and respected not only ate but
baked fruitcake; and second, the foods in Gressett Grub are arranged by
gastronomical merit: breads first, then desserts, then meats, and last (and
least), the stepchild side dishes, more than half of which involve Jell-O.
This culinary pecking order goes a long way toward explaining why I will
never tip over in a high wind.
Some Texas cookbooks aren't amusing; they're laughable. I can really work up
a hissy fit over The Texas Cookbook (1949), by Arthur and Bobbie Coleman. I
don't know the Colemans, and I suspect by now they're tending that great Aga
in the sky, but they thought reds and pintos were the same frijoles and even
used the words "chiles" and "pimientos" interchangeably. Among their
purportedly authentic Texan recipes are spiced eel, mutton curry, barbecued
armadillo with sesame seeds, and stewed rattlesnake with shallots and red
wine. But I was grateful to learn that, when I'm preparing to bake my
freshly killed possum, I can soak the carcass in hot lye to remove the fur.
Silly me-all this time I've just been skinning it with my bowie knife!
One despairs to think that this kind of hookery-cookery book survives while
other legitimate gems are falling through the kitchen-floor cracks.
Fortunately, the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP)
is on the case. The group of some four thousand chefs, writers,
restaurateurs, and the like held its annual meeting in Dallas in April.
Along with the usual noshing and sloshing, the foodies enjoyed a special
treat: the release of four vintage cookbooks, the first wave of an ambitious
publication plan. Of the inaugural four, three are Texan: The El Paso Cook
Book, compiled by the Ladies Auxiliary of that city's YMCA in 1898; The Lone
Star Cook Book, sold by the Ladies of the Dallas Free Kindergarten and
Training School in 1901; and Mexican Cooking: The Flavor of the 20th
Century-That Real Mexican Tang, printed in San Antonio in 1911 for the
Gebhardt Chili Powder Company.
Why would such an elite group decide to reissue a trio of obscure cooking
manuals from a state that many nonresidents still regard with suspicion?
After all, there are far-more-famous tomes out there. That's the point, says
New Yorker Andrew F. Smith, who selected the titles; the IACP wants to save
endangered treasures. "As far as I know, only three copies of The Lone Star
Cook Book have survived," he says, "and there are only six known copies of
The El Paso Cook Book.& rdquo; Smith is a food historian who has written or
edited eighteen books, including last year's 1,584-page Oxford Encyclopedia
of Food and Drink in America. He acknowledges that the choices were, in
part, a tip of the toque to the association's host city, Big D, but also
reveals that "Tex-Mex and Texas barbecue rank near the top of my personal
culinary hierarchy." As for the Gebhardt pamphlet, which was originally
hawked for 15 cents, Smith firmly IDs it as "the first Mexican American
cookbook." Holy mole& mdash;that's like the Ark of the Covenant! Say no más.
Clearly, cookbooks in early Texas were few and far between, right? Wrong. At
least 402 had been published by the end of 1936, Texas's centennial year.
This factoid comes to us courtesy of Elizabeth Borst White, of Houston, a
medical librarian and cookbook collector who has researched a bibliography
of Texas's culinary works, starting in 1855, when Gail Borden (the milk man)
put out an eight-page booklet explaining how to prepare his dry,
slow-to-spoil "meat biscuit." White's labor of love, a special edition of
which sold out at the IACP fest, led her to some long-shelved gems, such as
the K.K.K. Cook Book (Honey Grove, 1894; the initials stood for Kute Kooking
Klub) and 300 Ways to Please a Husband (Lockhart, 1915). Fifty-one titles
were advertising promotions, including the 1915 Economy Cookbook from
Imperial Sugar, of Sugar Land, which called for the company's products in
just about everything-not just candies and cakes but also vegetables (lima
beans, pickled beets) and even one-dish meals like tuna lasagne and pot
roast.
Which reminds me, it's dinnertime and I've got to get that possum in the
oven. No lye.
Thanks for sharing this. quite interesting and amusing:-)