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Cookbooks That Built America And Why We Still Love Them Today! · Family Tree Food Stories

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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: It's not bad, it's just
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: I'm just gonna put this on pause.
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Hey everybody, it's Nancy May and Sylvia Lovely with another episode
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of Family Tree Food and Stories.
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Before we start, I wanna share something that's come to my attention.
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A couple people have actually told me they love when they see the videos and some
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other things, but they don't know how to subscribe to the show so that they get
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notifications every week that it's out.
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And if you're not aware Our show Releases.
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Every Thursday early in the morning, but it's like clockwork,
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so it's always available.
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But go to podcast.family tree food stories.com.
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We'll put an a link in the show notes so you've got that.
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You can always get there.
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At the top of the page, there's a button or a menu option that says follow.
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If you click on that, it'll show you all the different listening platforms that
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you can listen on, which the ones either are only a short list, but there
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are hundreds of them you can listen on.
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Click on your favorite listening app, and then.
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Most of those apps when you get there, 'cause this, that, that link
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or Spotify or Good listen, or whatever it is you can follow.
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And every week you'll get an update saying.
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Thursday morning, the show has released.
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We have one other thing that we're doing, which is a survey, and
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I'll put in a link to that also in the episode notes at the end.
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And we're trying to we are trying to, but we need your help in giving us some
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feedback on the show so that we can.
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Make the show better for you.
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We think it's pretty cool, right?
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Sylvia
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah, there
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: some great response from our listeners, so thank
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you for sharing your comments with us.
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But we're always trying to improve because, every recipe can just be
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tweaked a little bit more, maybe with an idea or an extra glass of wine.
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Thank you, Julia Childs.
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But this episode.
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I wanna start with a question to our dear listeners and followers.
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I sound like an episode of Bridgeton, but my question is,
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how many cookbooks do you own and do you actually cook from them?
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Because this show is all about cookbooks and the importance of instruction manuals.
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Most of us need at least one or two in our house or in our kitchen, and
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probably not much more, but we keep buying them and we've inherited them.
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. And they live in our kitchen, that they cookbooks live and breathe
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in our kitchen, at least in mine.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Mm-hmm.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: About you, Sylvia?
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: You know, you don't treat cookbooks
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like other books, but in my case, I don't have a huge amount.
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The last cookbook I bought was Al Ruker.
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He was in town, you know, the weather guy on a whatever, whichever one he's on.
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and that was interesting.
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We're gonna talk about that a little bit later, about celebrity cookbooks
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And I guess the only other one I acquired recently was about, there
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was a famous restaurant in Savannah and my friend sent me that it's,
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I'll have to get the name of that one.
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It was so cool.
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But we don't mind the stains and notes and the margins of
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the cookbooks that we love.
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In fact.
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The one that I got with my air fryer is got the pages all bent over and
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stains and all that kinda stuff.
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You know, for my part I grew up in a, what I'm gonna call, and we're
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gonna talk about this later too, what might be called a primitive home.
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There were no cookbooks, but that's a thing, absolutely a thing.
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It's just where ideas and recipes were passed down.
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And my parents were raised in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky which
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is an interesting place where people really have to be very self-sufficient.
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And they grew everything and they just made up things and it was handed down.
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But I always remember talking to my father who would protest when
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someone would say, wow, you must have been hungry when you were young.
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He knew, he replied with pride.
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No, we ate real good.
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And so that was without recipes and you know that unless they
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were handed down, which they were, and they grew their own food.
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So that was sort of my perspective from a, history of my family.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: I'm not sure that we really.
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Actually need to cook all the time from cookbooks.
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Although I have a dear friend that I've grown up with, Diane, and she is very good
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and very specific at following a recipe.
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I'm very bad at following recipes.
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I'm like, oh, it said that, but I don't have that, so I'll try this.
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And, oh, it said a little bit of garlic.
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Maybe I'll put like a little bit more than garlic and I'll throw
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some rosemary and see what happens.
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But that's how I cook.
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However, on the cookbook front.
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were in a new house as most people know, and we built the house,
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but the kitchen island, I insisted that there was a space at the end
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of the island for two shelves for cookbooks, and they are totally filled.
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with my mom's cookbook, which I have right here with us, as you can hear
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everything moving things around.
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A make it now bake It later, cookbook that.
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Interestingly enough, the type in there is all handwritten and
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printed, so it feels like it's.
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mom cookbook.
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Anyway, my mother loved those cookbooks and I can't even
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remember going to the store.
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There was a little gift shop in Marion, Massachusetts that had all these
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particular kind of cookbooks on the brand, make it now, bake it later, and she would
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go through and which one she had and which one she didn't have, and what one
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she liked and which one she didn't like.
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And she always cooked something out of it, and every single time they were great.
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But mom also had a joy of cooking cookbook, which
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: yeah, we'll talk about that too.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: And my sister got that one.
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So I, one year at a church, rummage Fair, which I love those things
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because you never know what sort of treasures you're gonna get.
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Found a joy of cooking that had belonged to somebody and it felt like a mom book.
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I have somebody else's mom's joy of cooking book.
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I have no idea who they are, but
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: I have an ambition to write a cookbook,
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even though I'm not real familiar.
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I own a restaurant and I don't know, people just don't get it that when,
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as you age, you don't need to eat as much as restaurants feed you.
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So we always split and we always bring something home.
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So I'm a take home queen, and then I repurpose my leftovers and I mash
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everything together in kind of a leftover.
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Thing and it tastes really good.
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So a leftover cookbook.
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Okay.
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There's
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: we did a show on leftovers, so
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: yeah, so there
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: if you haven't heard that one, we'll put the
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episode in the show notes as well.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: yeah, Well,
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: I like that on leftover cookbooks.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: And they were always a clue to lifestyle too, and
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how you were raised and how you were, reflective of what happened in your
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kitchen as the way you live your life.
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just like my describing my family and you describing your family, we're all
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different and we all have some form of.
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Cookbook in our head, whether it's, so we make 'em up from other recipes
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and transform them into something else if they're like leftovers.
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So it's sort of a, an ethos of cookbook ery.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: But you have some history on cookbooks.
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'cause I found this fascinating about how the early cookbooks came about.
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And I honestly, I didn't even think about the early history of cookbooks until we
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really started to dive or dig into this episode and doing a little research.
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So why don't you share some of that information?
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah.
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The earliest cookbooks weren't really written for home cooks.
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I suspect they were over the open fire or big cauldrons.
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You can see the image in your mind.
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they were doing what my family did.
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It was just from handing down.
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The cookbooks were written for professionals, the palace kitchens,
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the monasteries, and a lot of food comes outta monasteries.
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By the way, if you've noticed that Christmas time fudge and all kinds of
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things.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: monk beer.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: The Monk beer.
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Yeah.
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And they already assumed that you knew what you were doing.
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So the instructions were pretty vague to the point of absurdity.
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Take some butter cook until done.
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I love that one.
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They weren't teaching tools.
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They were records.
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They were records that we keep of the times.
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And you know, like I said, home cooks relied on family tradition rather than,
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recipe books and that kind of thing.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: So not as precise, but they were survival mechanisms
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teaching a skill and handing them down from one generation to the other.
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I've got images of not necessarily a mom, but it could be an aide or
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somebody else that's sitting there with a young child showing them how.
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How to cook and prepare things, or even the boys were learning how to prepare wild
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game and take care of those things, but it really is a way To look at history
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and then we evolved into church cookbooks and women's clubs and the junior league
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and the cookbook talk about survival.
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The cookbooks became a fundraiser, so food became a different
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type of survival mechanism.
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In the documentation of these tools really is what they were And
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That in itself tells you so much about the generations 'cause you don't see cookbooks
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being created by communities like today, at least like I remember as a kid and to
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have your name and your recipe selected for a church cook cookbook or a community
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cookbook wasn't an honor because now your name was in print and it was a big deal.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: You know, you made me think of a cookbook we do
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have that I'd forgotten about was Ruby.
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Ruby was a country woman from Moorhead, Kentucky.
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If you're familiar with Kentucky, it's about an hour and a half.
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It's actually a pretty sophisticated community now, a home of Morehead
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State University and some really nice medical facilities.
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But Ruby was a home cook and she gave Bernie.
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Her cookbook for Christmas one year.
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So we still have Ruby and I kept that one.
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I left some of them behind, gave them to my daughter-in-law.
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But Hey, I gotta tell you another thing about cookbooks too.
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I think it's so cute that often that they're spiraled.
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I love that.
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But, and you know, I can use 'em real easily where you can
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just bend back to the page.
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But they were written a lot by women.
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And it was one of the ways, an only place where their voice appeared in print.
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Ha, love that.
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We didn't know that we were holding up the banner for women, did we?
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: They became famous there versus today
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where the chefs are
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predominantly, the big names that they're out there that you hear
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about are men other than, Martha and Ina, who we see everywhere You
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know I hate to say that.
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I'm not sure.
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I consider them cooks.
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Maybe ina garden, she's definitely a creative cook and a caterer
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but not cooks in the sense of, oh James Beard, who , has a very
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interesting and colorful background.
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Or Bobby Flay or some of the others that you think about
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that are French or Jacques,
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah.
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The personal memories though and like I said I wish I had more
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cookbooks to talk about, but I did remember Ruby, but I always think
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of uh, Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: No no telling what they did, but that may
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have been where rock soup originated.
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Now there's a simple recipe, you wanna
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hear it.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: rock soup.
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Did you as a kid ever the book called Stone Soup?
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: Remember that one?
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know it was not a cookbook necessarily, but
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: It was a recipe,
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: was, it was
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a
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recipe.
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But you mentioned that you didn't really have too many cookbooks in, in your
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house, or you don't have that many.
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I like I've got a lot of them, but.
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I was at Barnes and Noble, oh, probably a couple of weeks ago, and was amazed
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at How big the cookbook and cooking section in these stores have gotten
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these bookstores, they are huge.
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it was the whole wall of the upper level of this.
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Barnes and Nobles down in the Tampa area, and cookbooks from Harry Potter
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cookbooks to the death of cooking.
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That sounds very ominous.
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But there was so many, and I probably, I wish there would've been a chair there
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'cause I would've sat down for hours and I would've lost Bob but, but I like the
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ones that you can find in the little nooks and crannies and the special gift stores.
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I've got one from the Connecticut Shores that I've made a number
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of recipes and obviously, 'cause I don't follow recipes too well.
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I've made some versions of my own.
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But the Silver Palette Cookbook is a great one.
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There's two of them that I've got.
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There's a cranberry apple and red wine pie in there.
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That is my go-to.
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That is really good.
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And then of course, Julia's book.
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I have Julia's book and then I recently, I didn't even know, I've been
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collecting them in finding them in old junk shops, which are fascinating.
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I found one called Fire and Ice that was printed in 1978.
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And found just, I just opened it by chance this morning.
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It opened to a recipe for Diana's Portuguese sweet bread.
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Now I didn't even know what Portuguese sweet bread till we
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moved to Massachusetts as a kid.
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This is like cake.
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It's delicious.
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So I'm gonna have to try that one now that it must be something that was karma.
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It just happened to open to that one.
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But
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: let me, um.
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Yeah, let me, add in that Barnes and Noal makeup, don't know if it's there
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or in the children's section, but my grandchildren have cookbooks written for
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children, and that's an interesting thing.
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And they're into cooking.
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they understand and they read cookbooks, but going back to the early days.
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The early settlers used the British cookbooks.
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Of course they did, right?
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until Amelia Simmons wrote American Cookery, which incorporated
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American native dishes in foods like cornmeal, for there you have it.
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Amelia did that.
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Next came Fanny Farmers, the Boston Cooking School.
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a kind of I was turned towards science and I bought one of these once
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: A Fanny
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: could, uh, the original, not original
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one, but a reprint of it.
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And you could barely read it.
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It was written scientifically.
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And that was published in 1896 and she was a cooking
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expert and a culinary educator.
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And so it was very.
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Precise in its measurements and written in a very stilted, almost under un
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understandable style and you know, about level teaspoon and, and all of that.
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So it took everything in a direction of precision as opposed to just sort
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of a pinch of this, a pinch of that.
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And that had been more how people had gone along.
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And then of course, Nancy talk about the joy of cooking,
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: So the Joy of Cooking was a self-published book,
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which I find fascinating because today self-publishing is the hot thing versus
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going through a regular publisher.
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But 1931 by Irma Rombauer.
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Who was not a chef, but she turned things, words a little bit more
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reasonable for the home cook.
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A little less scientific, but certainly very valid in what she did.
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And the interesting factoid is that she wrote this book after her husband
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committed suicide in 1930 and she needed money, so she used $3,000 of her.
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Remaining inheritance and printed 3000 copies.
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So it was a dollar a book.
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And the Joy Cooking book is thick.
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It's, I don't know how many pages.
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It's a couple.
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I'm gonna look at it right now because it's a couple hundred pages and lemme see,
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what was the last page number on this?
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It's those two somewhere.
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Quickly I'm opening up, you know it's almost a thousand pages.
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So 855 at the index.
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close to 900 pages.
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That's a big book.
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Anyway so she sold these books during the Depression area as a way to sur
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survive and take care of her family.
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today it has sold over 20 million copies.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Wow.
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Wow.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: this is another story of food.
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Being a survival mechanism.
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And today the family is still involved and they reprint or recreate
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this they I should say, they don't recreate, they update the book
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every, I think it's every 10 years.
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I don't have the exact number, but it's about every 10 years.
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' cause I remember hearing the grandchildren talking about it.
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And they test every single recipe in there to make sure that it.
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It's worthy of staying in the book, or do they need to tweak it,
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which makes it even more important.
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'cause that truly is the joy of cooking, truly is a family
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Uh huh.
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A family memoir of a family.
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Yeah.
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And and I've got a question for you before, but I wanted to also
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just finish that off by saying to recalling the World War ii, you
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mentioned it in the depression era, brought on a whole new set of cookbooks.
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Ending food waste became a topic.
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It's returning, isn't it?
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And including the wartime cook and included tips on how to use filler and
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meats, oatmeal, potatoes as filler.
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'cause you didn't have much meat.
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Right.
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And how Yeah.
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How to use sugar and butter sparingly.
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But I was just curious, what's your best and favorite recipe
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out of the joy of cooking?
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: I would say sugar cookies.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: That's
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: You know, there they're very simple recipes in there
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that I go to, but I have a cheater.
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So the cheater in the Joy of Cooking book, it's not actually in the book, but I you
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mentioned that you have recipes from like, when you buy something like a device.
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I bought a popover pan years ago.
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It had to be probably like 20 years ago.
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And.
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It came with a popover recipe.
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That is the one popover recipe that works for me.
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It is still on that original piece of paper that came with a popover
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pan, and it is tucked in the front of my Joy of cooking book.
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I have to actually now write it and put it in our family tree food stories
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book with a story in how I got it and.
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How everybody loves my popovers.
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But, the depression era, not to jump around.
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I also have a cookbook that I found at a junk or antique shop
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that was from the Depression era.
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Not depression, but world War I, world War ii, and they talk about
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rationing during World War II
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And just how they added that into each recipe was fascinating to
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read the history of our country, basically, or what was going on.
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Through a cookbook that was in somebody's home.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah.
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And you know, you brought back a memory mine.
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If there were any recipes in my family, they were on index cards.
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And I'd still remember the memory.
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it's one I regret is when my aunt was late for a family party and we
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had to get back to Kentucky and she was going to make apple dumplings.
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And I have the recipe and I've shared it before.
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But.
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She had it meticulously written out and it's in her handwriting,
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but we left.
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It was, she was in Ohio.
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Oh yeah, she was in Ohio we were in Ohio visiting, and I said, no,
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we can't wait any longer and left.
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And she's always late, chronically late.
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So she did arrive about an hour after we left with her apple dumplings,
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and she died shortly thereafter.
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I'm like, go ahead and eat those apple dumplings people.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: And tell the stories.
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Now we're gonna take a quick break because there's a lot more about
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cookbooks that tell the story of who we are and even where we are today.
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But we'll be right back.
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So Sylvia, I'm ready to crack another cookbook,
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: I bet you are.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: not an egg back of the spine of a cookbook.
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So modern cookbooks today didn't invent storytelling.
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'cause there's so many, Stanley Tucci has a cookbook that's out there
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and I love the shows that he's got.
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He of travels Italy and talks about the history of the region
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and the people in the area, but.
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There's only a few recipes in that book, and it tells his
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story, which is interesting.
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But I think a cookbook should tell our own family story.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: I think so I will say that I did read
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Jacque Pepins bio, one of his bio books, and there's a recipe in there.
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I'm dying to try, but I never have enough people to eat it, which is Ruben's.
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It's
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: Oh, a rub.
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A Ruben,
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he had a recipe for a
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah, Yeah, we did.
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It just sounds so good.
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But, we do all our entertaining at the restaurant, it's like our extension.
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So we don't do that at home.
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And I can't eat a whole Ruben, not even a whole Ruben.
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But the beauty of it is, it's there if you have a family and you wanna try
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something new, and then it's like you said, it's just got some recipes in it.
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But it's not all about recipes.
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But, you know, the best of these books offer three things.
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Authority, intimacy and story.
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Trust me, I know food and that probably is kinda like Al Roker.
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So you watch him do the news and you trust him for that.
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And then he wants to tell you what his family eats and his favorite recipes and
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he probably doesn't cook every day, but, it's kind interesting and I'll tell you
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by the way, how I got where I am today.
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So
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: And cookbooks really, whether you're talking about
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your own family cookbook that has been handed down, or one that you've
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bought and put your own notes in.
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They give you a, I shouldn't say they give you, they force you.
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To slow down and just take a break and well.
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The cookbooks today are absolutely gorgeous.
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The photographs and the work and the art that goes into them.
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I've got a cookbook that I found again at another sort of junk shop.
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From the Homestead Inn,, I think that's West Virginia,
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and it's absolutely stunning.
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I have never made anything out of it, but I just love running my hand
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over the pages and thinking about a time that I visited that with a, it
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was an afternoon with a boyfriend in college with oh my God, look at this
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castle in the middle of West Virginia.
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And we of felt like they imported the squirrels because they
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looked so well groomed, but.
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And this string quartet and watching everybody having
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tea, it was just delightful.
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And we left and had lunch at McDonald's.
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But being able to look at the beauty in the art of the cookbook, , my
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mother-in-law gave me a cookbook that she had and probably didn't
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really use that much, but it was Better Homes and Gardens of the day.
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And it was the difference between the cookbooks of, I would say.
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Probably the fifties, the photograph ones, and today are night and day because
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the photographs were not particularly beautiful in appetizing, everything.
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Had sort of a yellow okra look to it with the photographs
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah, although you want me to play.
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You want me to, yeah, you want me to play devil's advocate on that A little bit.
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Okay.
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So all that food is so beautiful and don't even ask how they
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make it look so beautiful.
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'cause
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then it'll like destroy all that for you.
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And yours never looks that good, you know?
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, a little imperfection in the photographs is something I'm not opposed to.
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And it's just your own tastes, The photos in these and the famous people
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cookbooks, just like you said, maybe they're not meant to look that good.
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Maybe they're not meant to be cooked to look that good.
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They're something else.
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They're evoking some sort of.
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Nostalgia better times and being in the kitchen and it's
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not meant to look like that.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: Comfort and family and coziness
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: and that's stage their own, you
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know, what you feel like you want.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: and you know what?
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Everything will look better if you just throw a little.
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Chopped green onion or parsley on it every now and then if everything
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looks beige and brown on our plates at dinner, like I did it last night
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and I cooked some salmon and I think this looks a little pink and brown.
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It needs something else.
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I just took some green chives that we had the, like the freeze dried chives
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in a big bottle and probably not they weren't fresh, so call me out on that.
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but I just sprinkled it on.
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It's oh, that looks so much prettier.
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Voila, we had dinner.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: I love that.
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we don't know where cookbooks are gonna go tomorrow.
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They'll evolve just like everything else in America.
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We sort of reinvent things, right?
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But we remember also when salt and pepper were the primary seasonings
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: Oh my mom.
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Yep.
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Salt and pepper.
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Yep.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Now I will say I've got a whole big lineup because the
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problem with people like me is you need a tablespoon of this or a teaspoon of
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this, but you can only buy these kind of, you know, jars that are bigger than that.
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So you gotta really watch them and watch the expiration dates and all of that.
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But I do have a whole cabinet full of them because the times I do cook.
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You wanna add a little bit more of that spice and the ability to experiment.
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And sometimes it works and sometimes it just doesn't.
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But one of the most famous cookbooks, 'cause you're talking about ethnic
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cookbooks too, are coming into Vogue.
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The immigrant cookbook Recipes That Make America Great by Layla.
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MBE has recipes from second generation chefs from six continents.
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So that sounds pretty cool too,
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: yeah, I'm gonna have to go search that one out.
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Spend a couple hours at Barnes and Nobles.
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And of course, everybody's probably had at some point in their house, whether
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it's theirs or their mom, one of those.
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Church cookbooks or a junior league or even the local women's club?
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I would say what it's the school, you know, the local school one that
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is a little stained, a little tattered been used because the friend down
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the street put her recipe in it.
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Whether it was good or not, it didn't matter because they
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weren't really tested by.
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The producers, they were tested by us, by our parents they tell a story in their
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own right about love and care and feeding for the community and recipes today.
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I'm really sad that so many of these recipes are now on the internet that you
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can find anything, which is fine, but it's not the same as holding a book in your
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hand and saying, I wanna cook that one.
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: Yeah, except I do love those recipes online.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: I do go through
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#74 Sylvia Cookbooks Zoom: I have a whole drawer full of them because there
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are times when you know, Hey, I'm just feeling a little experimental here.
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I don't wanna buy a whole cookbook to do it.
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I do use Ruby when I'm doing a Turkey.
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Bernie does that.
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Bernie does the Turkey, and he follows Ruby's.
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Advice.
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Old Ruby, she was something.
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And so anyway, but we keep the books even the ones we don't cook
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from those, like from Ruby and some people that we know and love.
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#74 Nancy Cookbooks Zoom: It's like keeping a cherished friend
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in your kitchen, in your house.
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Cookbooks give us a way to remind us that we're loved, that we share love in our
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kitchen and appreciation for one another.
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And as they say, every meal has a story.
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I
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would say not as they say.
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As we stay.
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Every meal has a story and every story is a feast.
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So on that note, if you have a cookbook story.
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Please share it with us and go to Podcast Family Tree Food Stories because we'd
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love to hear your story about a family cookbook or come to our Facebook page,
27:35
which is Family Tree Food Stories.
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We'll put a link in the episode notes, and again, every meal has a
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story and every story is a feast.
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We'll see you soon, or maybe we'll read about you in the next cookbook.
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Take care.
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Bye-bye.