About the Author
Marian Tracy was the author and editor of many books, including The Art of Making Real Soups and The East-West Book of Rice Cookery.
Wes Berry is Professor of English at Western Kentucky University and the author of The Kentucky Barbecue Book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This fun collection of regional recipes reveals the dominant cultural influences of places around the country. You get a taste of the immigrant origins of Rockford, Illinois, for instance, in a recipe for Swedish Cabbage Rolls, and of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in a recipe for Kolacky (sweet rolls filled with fruit and cheese). The Iowan recipe writer Naomi Doebel notes that Czechoslovakians made up about 20 percent of Cedar Rapids population in 1952 at the time of the book’s publication. These details, offered by many of the recipe writers, make the book more than just a collection of recipes. It’s like a mini-anthropology lesson on regional foodways, including the sources of the ingredients through farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering. The agricultural insights rate among this book’s many charms. The recipes from the Florida section arise from that state’s fruity abundance, with lime meringues, mango pie, lime pie, calamondin marmalade, loquat pie, and mango chutney. I learned that “Colorado Pascal celery is nationally famous” (there’s an accompanying recipe for Pascelery Soup). The book includes many preservation recipes: fig pickles from California; pear relish and “Pear Chutney De Luxe,” both made with hard Kieffer pears native to south Alabama, which also grows pecans (celebrated in a recipe for Orange-Candied Pecans). Oregon recipes reveal the abundance of fruits (pears and apples), nuts (filberts) and seafood (smelt, salmon, oysters, clams of various sorts, including the geoduck) of the Pacific northwest. Advice on game cookery appears throughout the collection, especially in the western states, with recipes for pheasant, duck, turtle, venison, elk, quail—and everyone’s favorite, opossum. Another extra-culinary bonus of this book are the historical insights provided by the food writers, as when Lillian Martin of Chicago’s Sun-Times mentions the “recent influx of D.P.’s and immigrants from central Europe” bringing their eats to the City of Big Shoulders. I had to look up the abbreviation and found that D.P. means “Displaced Person” and refers to the Displaced Person Act of 1948, which allowed 200,000 European war refugees to relocate to the USA. In the section on Michigan, I learned that pasties (pronounced like “mast” not “mace”), one of the distinctive foods of Michigan’s upper peninsula, are an import from England, when miners from Cornwall came in the 1870s-1880s to mine copper, and the Cornish women made these baked pies filled with meats and tubers for their hardworking hubbies. I’d seen pasties on café menus on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota and guessed they were rooted in the region’s Scandinavian heritage. Mighty fulfilling to learn a bit about the economic-historical-cultural roots of a regional food like the savory pasty.
