Cooking through decades

 

My mother was a gourmet cook. My grandmother was an old-fashioned cook. Food was important in our house. We would discuss lunch plans at breakfast and dinner plans at lunch. Conversations often involved recipes, restaurants and food in general.

My mother who was a journalist in her later years had a newspaper column called Stove Stories https://stovestories.blogspot.com which she later collected for a book. Although it was never published in her lifetime, I put it into a blog. It was her theory that with favorite meals there are memories. For me there are a lot of good eating memories.

I’ve inherited my love of food as well as my great grandmother’s bean pot (used almost every Saturday night from the 1880s through to Kennedy’s presidency, a wooden bowl and a curved cutting knife, and the New England Yankee Cookbook.

 I consult the cookbook fairly regularly for ideas. I like knowing if I make Coventry Baked Soup the family of George Taylor of South Coventry, CT enjoyed it too. I wish I knew more about them. Was it a big family for example?

 

I like the first page that says "An anthology of INCOMPARABLE RECIPES FROM SIX NEW ENGLAND STATES and a Little Something about the People whose Traditions for Good Eating is herein permanently recorded BY IMOGENE WOLCOTTT from the files of Yankee magazine and from Time worn Recipe Books and many Gracious Contributors.”

A web search of Imogene shows that the book has been republished. I suspect Imogene never suspected when she wrote the book in1939 one of the original copies would travel to France -- but it did.

Is available on Amazon.