Almost everyone I know has one – that super-valued, rough-edged, batter-speckled cookbook they turn to again and again.
While new, fancy cookbooks with shiny pages and full-color photography remain ensconced on the living room shelves, those old wire- or plastic-combed collections remain closer at hand, at the edge of the counter or in a handy hutch. Their covers are often plainly decorated by someone associated with the book, or a duplicate of other covers offered by one of several fundraising printer companies that served the middle United States over the course of the middle and later 20th century.
Church and community cookbooks have become part of our local culture. Every small town has a sampling, usually from whatever congregations were nearby. They were put together to raise money for functions or buildings and they were bestsellers, in that everyone in town ended up with one. When it wasn’t a church, it was a school or a club or a gathering of friends who put together these tomes that were quick and easy to get printed and which were all but eternal.
Stories in the Recipes
You can tell by some of the entries in these books who the movers and the shakers were. Some cookbooks had a single entry from each person who contributed, but more often there would be one or two superstars that would stand out, proud of their cooking and happy to share. Or, like when my own mom put together Cornerstone Cookery, published by the St. Vincent’s Infirmary Employee Council in 1984, about a third of the recipes ended up coming from my own family when submissions were scarce.
What each and every one of these books did, though, was capture a moment in space and time in a way few other objects could. In an age before the internet, these volumes catalogued the food we all ate from day to day. The more extravagant recipes, usually for desserts or highly regarded holiday entrees, showed what we ate when we were celebrating. The more humble recipes, with their creative instructions on how to assemble a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or what to do while you’re waiting for something to cook, show us humor and the good nature of the people sharing the recipes they know.
Flavors from the Past
In-between, you get a capsule of history particular to the congregation or area in question, the dishes that are most likely to have been served at the table, the things that one generation didn’t want the next generation to forget. Some of those dishes, like the regional Arkansas dish known as Tallerine (usually pronounced TA-lur-EE-nee), all but evaporated by the end of the 20th century. The ground beef and noodles entree usually contained black olives and cheese, along with some sort of additional ingredient, which included everything from small green peas to green bell pepper, diced onions or even sliced tomatoes. It appeared to be a precursor to the commercial Hamburger Helper, and while prevalent under a host of different spellings in mid-century Arkansas cookbooks, all but disappeared by the mid- to late-1980s.
There were also concoctions, usually salads or side dishes, that were popular back then but would be undesired today, like congealed salads with a base of Jell-O or any variety of pea-and-mayo mixes. Items utilizing SPAM can still be found in cookbooks today, but canned brothers Vienna Sausages and potted meat are frowned upon and excluded in 21st century collections. For young homemakers looking for ways to change up meals in an age when canned foods were on the shelves at their local grocery while convenience foods like TV dinners and frozen pizzas were not, combining what was easily available to create something that stood out was paramount.
A Taste of Arkansas History
Over the past several years, I have been collecting a variety of Arkansas cookbooks, finding them at thrift stores and in the bins at Goodwill, receiving them from families who are rehoming them when loved ones pass, and taking in duplicates from libraries with multiple copies. In my spare time and on days when the weather is too angry to travel, I sit down and read through them, noting common elements to time and regions.
In 2021, I published a cookbook based on these Arkansas community collections, Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State. In its 103 recipes gathered from cookbooks from between 1935 and 1985, I hoped to offer a picture of cooking in mid-century Arkansas, what people were eating at home. These were most of the 107 recipes I’d culled from some of those many cookbooks, showcasing recipes that I found through the era. I took them with me to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, and over the course of 12 days recreated them, redacting recipes with modern equivalents (for instance, noting that the tabs of cream cheese available in the 1950s was three ounces, compared to the 8 ounce block offered today) and photographing them for posterity.
Some items, such as Green Rice, are very popular even today with home cooks in the Arkansas Delta. Others, like Salmon Croquettes and Tomato Aspic, are very rarely seen today. And then there are things like Guacamole Salad, Hush Puppies, and Fried Zucchini that are known worldwide today.
When I research these recipes, I tend to stop at the year 2000. It’s a nice, even point to cut from, and a moment in time when the internet was just really becoming ubiquitous in homes around the world. The combination of the World Wide Web, retailers like Amazon and Walmart, and the sudden availability to anyone, anywhere foodstuffs that had previously been hard to find – like ube sweet potatoes from Japan or besan flour from India – changed our food culture irreversibly, almost overnight. I plan to continue the research and create more compilations as I learn more and open up these veritable time capsules of Arkansas food.
Date Nut Bread
Folks here in Arkansas, particularly in rural communities, would have access to certain foods certain times of the year. When it came to nuts, what you had stored back was usually reliant on what was available close by. The nuts in this recipe could be pecans, walnuts, or hickory nuts. Dates would come dried, like raisins and prunes (dried plums), and could be stored for a long time. Everything in this recipe from Mrs. Jewell Teater, originally printed in a 1954 cookbook by the Women’s Society of Christian Service at Asbury Methodist Church in Little Rock, could conceivably be in the pantry or fridge, ready to whip up – and let me tell you what, it was certainly a wonderful thing to enjoy, with an almost chocolatey consistency and a soft mouthfeel. I love this best the next day, sliced and toasted with butter – and yes, I substitute butter for the margarine.
Green Pea Salad
While it’s not much to look at, this green pea salad was common at gatherings in rural Arkansas when I was a kid in the 1970s. This version appears in Favorite Recipes from Clay County Kitchens (second printing, 1955) and is attributed to Mrs. Otto Elsass, who was part of the Glaub Lone Holly chapter of the Clay County Council of Homemaker Demonstration Clubs.
Kat Robinson is Arkansas’s original culinary traveler, with three PBS programs, thousands of articles, and 13 books on food in The Natural State to her credit. The Emmy-nominated documentary host and food historian is currently working on a history of Arkansas barbecue.
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