2018_September-October.indd

FEATURE

plastic rings, these cookbooks offer a surefire way to begin understanding the personality of a town or region through its distinctive foodways. There’s the Pirate’s Pantry cookbook from the Junior League of Lake Charles, which includes an entire section on cooking with wild game — complete with illustrations of deer, alligator and a supporting cast of critters. The Plantation Cookbook from New Orleans’ Junior League has a recipe for the classic Creole dish crawfish cardinale that’s so delicious there are online message boards devoted to drooling over it. And in even the tiniest towns across the Gulf South, you can count on community cookbooks to not only exist, but be one of the most democratic forms of culinary history. “The community cookbook is the way communities stay in touch with who they are,” says LaMancusa. “It’s also a wonderful way for newcomers to get themselves in touch with what they [the communites] do.” They’ve also proven to be exceedingly popular over the years — and not just in their hometowns. Mobile, Alabama’s Recipe Jubilee! has sold over 164,000 copies since being published in 1964. Talk About Good! , compiled by the Junior League of Lafayette, is now in its 30th printing, with over 775,000 copies in global circulation. And the most popular of them all, River Road Recipes out of Baton Rouge, has sold a whopping 1.3 million copies since 1959. “The joy of these cookbooks is that, in most cases, the women contributed recipes that were historical snapshots of what people were eating and where they were eating it,” LaMancusa explains. “We’ll get people in the store who say, ‘My grandmother contributed a recipe to that book!’ People come in looking for them.” In true Southern fashion, contributing to a community cookbook can also be a way to not only share a family recipe with others, but gain some serious bragging rights within one’s social circle. It’s not hard to imagine a couple of legacy Junior Leaguers subtly trying to one-up each other about their family’s cookbook connection: “Other people claim to have the best deviled oysters in Baton Rouge, but they used my grandmother’s method in the original edition of River Road Recipes …” “Well, my aunt’s sand tart cookies are so

good they appeared in River Road Recipes ’ first edition and the fourth River Road that’s all about entertaining!” Unlike with other cookbooks, pride runs particularly deep for community works because they’re so unbelievably intimate. Community cookbooks aren’t the creations of some faceless culinary scribe, and they most certainly aren’t a collection of recipes from a famous chef tinkering away in a hoity-toity kitchen. No. Each recipe has the name of an individual attached to it: the same local people — neighbors, friends, fellow bowling league members — who you can, in theory, run into while buying groceries each week. (Perhaps they’re buying the ingredients for dishes in the book!) These recipes are for the people, by the people. And when it comes to older editions of community cookbooks — those passed down between generations — it’s easy to begin building storylines around the recipe- makers themselves based on the dishes they’ve decided to share with the world. For the culinarily inclined, selecting a “signature recipe” for a community cookbook has the potential to reveal more about a person than any official personality test. Would you rather be forever associated — in print — with a dish like stuffed mirlitons, lemon chiffon pie or something called “crabmeat sycamore”? The recipes towards which people gravitate tend to reveal a great deal about their personalities, intentionally or not. The way community cookbook contributors approach recipe writing — and the hodgepodge of styles therein — also helps to create a portrait of the person behind the recipe. When Charles H. Stewart of New Orleans notes in his write-up for “bowle a la kumpa” (a German wine punch) that it serves “four lusty drinkers, eight bon vivants, or 16 ‘party drinkers’” one can only assume he’d be disappointed in anyone who isn’t enjoying his punch lustily. And at the bottom of Lurnice Begnaud’s recipe for cheese puffs in Talk About Good! , there’s a parenthetical remark that proclaims, “Miss Begnaud is a math teacher at Lafayette Senior High and an excellent cook,”making it read like a not-so-subtle personal ad. Enthusiasm is often the foremost thing to seep through in community cookbook recipes, whether through the use of all

a way to raise money for organizations in the community, like churches or the Junior League,” explains Philipe LaMancusa of Kitchen Witch, a beloved culinary bookstore in New Orleans. With over 10,000 works lining its shelves, Kitchen Witch is a foremost place to explore the diversity of community cookbooks from the region and beyond. “People — mostly women — would donate recipes, and then one person would type them up and have them bound. They’d sell them mostly at church or community functions.” Often spiral bound or held together with

23

WWW.ROUSES.COM