I collect regional cookbooks (and recipes). I love those cookbooks printed by church or social groups, and if I do go into an antique store, I look for the books (antique stores are great places to find old, out of print, church cookbooks). When I travel, I rarely come back without a regional cookbook.
I looked in Charleston. There was a book store just down the street, and I looked there. All of the cookbooks billed as regional weren’t. There were Charleston’s favorite chef’s favorite recipes cookbooks, you know, with recipes that were in no way regional. You’d be just as likely to find those sorts of recipes billed as “regional” in San Francisco, Chicago, or Portsmouth. I ran into the same everywhere I looked.
After we got back from the Fort Sumter trip, we had just under two hours before the performance, so we didn’t have enough time to see the WW2 museum on the Yorktown. Next door was the aquarium, and if you see Fort Sumter you get free admission to the aquarium, so that’s where we went.
In the gift shop, there was a large cookbook section, and again, they were all silly foo-foo recipe collections — except one: Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking, edited by Blanche Salley Rhett. There a quite a lot of old recipes — and I mean old. One calls for bitter almonds (they’re illegal here, since they contain cyanide, but only bitter almonds have that characteristic intense almond flavor). There are recipes for corn bread, and something called batter bread, which looks like what I know as spoon bread. There are three or four recipes for Lady Baltimore cake, and of course, she-crab soup. Then, there are passages like these:
There were a dozen Negroes around the place, serving, cooking, singing, and dancing, and every few minutes, Dr. Adams would should into the kitchen, “Stop that cooking and come in and sing something!” So the Negroes would shift back and forth, to their own perfect delight, from cooking to dancing, from singing to serving.
Frankly, I’m surprised they weren’t forced to edit those old passages. But regional? It certainly is, and I plan to explore it in the kitchen. My question, though, is why authentic regional cookbooks are so hard to find. Why would you publish the recipes of some yankee chef who works in a popular restaurant and call it a regional or authentic cookbook? And is anybody stupid enough to look through a cookbook billed as regional, seeing pictures of nouvelle cuisine nonsense arranged in a little tower on a plate, and believe there is anything regional or authentic about it?
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Do you ever cook anything out of the Foxfire books?
I wonder if the dearth of real regional cookbooks is a more recent thing - if there’s some kind of a celebrity mentality at work (as in, “Let’s get the chefs of the popular restaurants to contribute recipes,” rather than - and I would argue the more interesting option - interviewing the octagenarians who have lived there all their lives and asking them to contribute).
It might also have something to do with a desire to look cosmopolitan? Or maybe in some cases the health-mania has taken over, and recipes for fried chicken replaced by ones for baked tofu strips?
I love old cookbooks and always look for them when I’m out antiquing. I particularly love the ones with ‘wrinkles for the cook’ (or whatever they may call them) where there are instructions on how to make soap, or prevent a horse from getting worms, or whatever. It’s history that never makes the textbooks, a little slice of how people lived.
I am not at all what you would consider a good cook, but I have found the best way to get decent local recipes here in the south is at church potlucks. My church has several a year, and people will break out their old family recipes and bring some original recipes. We have been collecting all the recipes that we can, though they are usually incomplete and not very descriptive.