Lawrence Hall, HSG
First, Catch Your
Cookbook
Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty
honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness…
-Charles Dickens, The Pickwick
Papers
Having never seen a copy of Mrs. Beeton’s famous cookery
book I don’t know if her recipe for rabbit begins with “First, catch your
rabbit.” If it isn’t true it ought to be, for it is fine example of both English
logic (rare) and English whimsy (a defining trait). The expression is often
used as a cautionary warning, similar to our American “Don’t count your
chickens until they’re hatched.”
The arc from Thanksgiving to Christmas is when the
thoughtful cook will seek out MeeMaw’s cookbook to verify seasonal specialties:
Waldorf salad, corn casserole, turkey fried or baked or broiled, ham fried or
baked or boiled, and those old traditional dishes special to each family.
Cookbooks are otherwise seldom consulted in our electrical
times, for the cook can quickly seek out a recipe on the Orwellian telescreen /
Tolkien Palantir. However, opening an old family cookbook in anticipation of
the holidays is a way of inviting all the ancestors back home for a moment in
time. The crumbling pages are the ones that the cook’s mother and grandmother
and great-grandmother read, maybe by the light of a coal-oil lamp on a dark winter
day long ago.
On the margins are many penciled notes and corrections. You
can almost hear some ancestor muttering, “Harrumph! What does that editor in
New York know about real cornbread!”
A slip of paper falls out – in Mama’s elegant penmanship is
a recipe she copied out from her own mother’s telling. Another piece of paper
might be a yellowing clipping from a newspaper, a rationing recipe with a scrap
of war news on the other side.
Older cookbooks might be bound in leather, like a Bible, and
the connections are real, for both allude to bread and life and stories. The
pages of both books are pages of the histories of families. In them you can,
for a moment, be a little child again, barely as high as the stove stop, helping
(not very well!) your grandmother with baking your favorite cookies. Do you
remember? Do you see and smell the joys of her warm kitchen again? Is Grandpa still
sitting at the table rustling the pages of The Houston Post and
muttering about the prices of cattle feed?
Some of the best memories are in that old family cookbook.
With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming soon, it’s time to refresh them. This is
a season when memories of a drive-through just won’t do.
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