eBook Miss Mary's Down-Home Cooking: Recipes from Small-Town America download

Want to learn simple southern cooking-Here it is with easy to fix recipes and a pretty book. The book also has some history in it. I think you will like this cookbook and if you are a collector, you will just enjoy reading and looking at it, too. The recipes are easy to fix and this book would be a wonderful gift for a young person.

Great just what I wanted.

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This is truly down-home cooking, the kind I was raised on in eastern Tennessee. For cooks accustomed to Julia Child and the like, the recipes are almost derisory. This is simple food, made by busy housewives from plain ingredients. The most complicated thing here is Coconut Cake.

Miss Mary -- Mrs. Bobo -- and her husband opened a boarding house in the hamlet of Lynchburg in 1908, and she was an active manager almost until her death in 1983 in the 102nd year of her age. However, she hired cooks to assist her. Her bill of fare was, at least on the evidence provided by Diana Dalsass, more limited than at the famous Purefoy Hotel, not far away in Talladega, which was the last word in Southern home cooking.

Though I haven't eaten at the Bobo Hotel, I am willing to bet that an actual meal there -- dinner (lunch) was the main one -- had even simpler dishes than are presented here, particularly vegetables. Especially in summer, vegetables are the best part of a down-home Southern meal, and most are simply prepared -- boiled, mostly, with some side meat or onions for seasoning.

Such delicious dishes hardly serve the purpose of a cookbook author, so almost all the vegetable recipes here are more elaborate, the filling pieces that, even in a boarding house, would probably be offered only one or maybe two at a time. At the Bobo Hotel, that meant casseroles of vegetables in white sauce -- not called béchamel -- and/or lots of Cheddar cheese. I am certain Miss Mary never called it that. It was rat cheese or store cheese.

Anyhow, an injudicious menu prepared from this book would be not just filling fuel for a laboring man but overrich.

Surprisingly, although there is a recipe for Ham Casserole and ham is called for as a seasoning, there is no recipe for boiling or baking a fine Tennessee ham.

There are a few differences in ingredients from what I was raised on. Miss Mary preferred white cornmeal. We always used yellow, and I think I was in high school before I learned there was such a thing as white.

Dalsass says that Lynchburgers used salt-cured bacon for seasoning rather than smoked bacon. That's true, but I never heard it called that. It was side meat, sowbelly or streak o' lean. Dalsass also suggests that cooks outside the South might have a hard time finding it. Hormel distributes it nationwide as "salt pork."

At least, Dalsass does not shy away from lard and other standbys of real down-home fare.

Another surprising absence from the recipes is piccalilli or some such home relish.

Miss Mary put sugar in her pone, which never happened in our family, and in her Ambrosia, which was forbidden. Her Ambrosia also had bananas and pineapple, which makes it not even Ambrosia by my standards. At least she used only a little sugar. I have eaten, without pleasure, Yankee cornbread that was almost sweet enough to be dessert cake.

Miss Mary was also overfond of Jell-O salads, and these are some of the more complex confections in the book. A little of those go a long way.

All in all, although this recipe book will present no challenges to the adventurous kitchen explorer, for anybody lucky enough to have experienced real Southern cooking (increasing difficult to find), "Miss Mary's Down-Home Cooking" is a satisfying repast. It is made more attractive with excerpts from the 1896 diary of Dance Record, a local woman, and some rather precious ruminations on old ways by local bloviator Emmett Gowan.