Cookbooks. God love em’.

Lately, I’ve become the laziest chef and cheese maker. For reasons better discussed in a later entry (or perhaps an entirely new blog), I’ve become both overwhelmed by life’s larger issues and under inspired by it’s culinary offerings. Soon, this mysterious force will be revealed to you, loyal readers, but for now all I can tell you is that cookbooks, and not cooking, have become the focus of my gastronomic life.

By comparison, my cookbook collection pales when stacked up against many cooks I’ve read about, coming in at just shy of 49 tomes. But when I looked recently through the entirety of my little collection, I was shocked at how insightful of an auto-biography it presents. I suppose this must be the true lure of any obsessive collection. Your acquisitions may lead you deeper into a particular subject matter, but mostly, they lead you deeper into the rather more elusive realm of self-understanding.

And my self-understanding begins with a hilarious little collection of recipes called “The Shasta County Medical Auxiliary Cookbook”. I would link this for you, but since it was self published by my mother’s social group in the 1980’s, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t find a copy anywhere...not even on ebay. I love this cookbook with all my heart. Not necessarily for the art with which it is arranged and focused, (haphazardly clumped together with instructions for things like Paella and Tuna Casserole…on the same page!) but for the sweet earnestness and confusion with which its creations are offered.

The set-up for this book is that it was sold as a fund raising item by a group of well-intentioned, affluent house wives in a small town in northern California, somewhere in the midst of the Reagan Era. The recipes were culled from the collective resources of these women and their families. My southern grandmother’s Miss Lilly’s “Cheese Straws” are printed there, along with Bee Livingston’s “Company, Foolproof, No Talent Stew” and Ella McGregor’s “Sweet Ham and Pork Loaf“. There are literally dozens of recipes that include Kraft Cheese, canned Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, Jello, and pounds and pounds of ground beef. There is evidence of these women stretching towards the exotic , with recipes including a nod towards Polynesia and China via canned pineapples and curry powder. There are the cherished, special recipes, preserved maybe from their original-heritage grandmothers, like the spectacular “Boeuf En Daube” By Gloria Clark which concludes “Serve with Duchess potatoes fluted around the edge in a border.” And then there are the mother’s little helper recipes, things like “Never-Fail Pie Crust” or “Easy Bacon Appetizer“.

As a kid, these foods impressed and repelled me at the same time, and I spent most of my efforts on the dessert section where I felt comfortable with the predictable reward of sugar. But even as young as I was, I could start to make sense of the inner lives of my mom and her friends through this post-modern mix of the ethnic, the corporate, the ancient, and the contemporary. I could feel the pressure they were under to impress their friends, keep their kids eating, keep their husbands interested, keep themselves sane. I could sense their struggle to act in a highly traditional manner in a highly transitional time. Intimidated and perplexed, I solaced myself with the baked goods section. Picture me in there somewhere in a quick flash of crimped hair and an off-the shoulder sweatshirt, coated in flour, reading this strange zeitgeist of a cookbook while I baked a batch of Dorothy Welborn’s Chocolate Cookies.

And the 80’s came and went. Most of the women, my mother included, got divorced and went back to work. Their kids grew up and had kids, and then those kids divorced themselves. Some moved, some re-married, and some of them have died. Very few of them I imagine will ever make a Pineapple-Lime Chicken Mold ever again. But it’s nice to remember them that way, in that precarious time. It’s nice to remember myself at that tender age, on the verge of a different kind of path than suggested by the The Shasta County Medical Auxiliary Cookbook. I was young, full of cookies, and ready for wild, uncharted culinary territories. Territories I will be covering in the next few blog entries, in fact.

Oh! And if this entry has made you burn with curiosity, drop me a line with your address and maybe I can send you a copy of the cookbook in question for your very own…