I've taken to collecting cookbooks again. Not because I need to learn to cook, or because I'm going to go through and cook most of the recipes in the books, necessarily, but more for a sense of connection to the people who contributed to the books. Specifically, I'm going through and collecting all of the little community/church/fraternal order cookbooks that seem to have come out by way of "Fund Craft Publishing" in KS, concentrating on communities local to me (but I'll take anything). Last weekend was the Coquille Kiwanis city wide garage sale, which is one of the best sources for books like these. So far I've struck gold with a couple of books from the Coquille Library Foundation. one from the Oregon 4-H Prizewinning Recipes from 1977, and the other from Dixie Mt. Grange near Banks, OR; and then there was the cookbook for the good residents of Lower Cape Fear, NC. This is the most racist cookbook I've ever read.
It's like they couldn't help but be as racist as possible. A bunch of the recipes are named "Mrs. Coon's this" or "Mr. Coon's that" and those recipes are always written in terribly broken English with tons of misspellings. There are two "poets' voices" used to introduce each section, and about 2/3 of those are written in the most stereotypical southern black accent imaginable. And it's not like they even tried to hide it, either. Every section that has food you would consider to be the fare of the more affluent families is introduced in perfect, flowing, unbroken English, as though it were written by a British playwright - but, you know, a silly one, because they're about wine and bread and stuff. Every section introduced by the stereotyped voice is full of meal stretchers, meat stretchers, casseroles, stews - you know, poor people food. You can tell that some effort has even been put into rationalizing how a meat-heavy dish that also has roasted veggies cooked at the same time is a casserole, so most of the chuck roasts and whatever else us poor people can afford is a casserole, but a prime rib roast or a crown roast of pork or lamb is a meat dish. It was really obvious when you got to the seafood section - tons and tons of recipes for shrimp with creole sauce interspersed with recipes for caviar on toast - but then you get to the casserole section and it's also full of recipes for shrimp with creole sauce, only they're labelled "shrimp n' grits," and every one of them calls for exactly the same ingredients as the "shrimp with creole sauce," except they say to serve it over grits instead of pasta like in the "seafood" section. I suppose I should just be glad that this was the fourth revised printing and not the first release. Something tells me this book was probably even more racist in 1955 than it was in 1976 when they printed my revised copy.