RECIPES

The cookbook I am holding is old. It is every hometown recipe book you’ve ever seen. Spiral bound, thick, stained, and there is a sketch on the cover featuring stately oaks draping over a shaded street.

These recipes are American history, in standard measurement form.

I once knew an old Sunday school teacher who made buttermilk pie that made grown men loosen their neckties. Once, at a Fourth of July supper, she gave me a slice and told me:

“God wants all his children to be a little soft in the middle.”

This particular cookbook comes from the Brewton Civic League. The recipes are everything you need to find a happy life.

Cheese grits, Squirrel D’ete, Congealed Cantaloupe Salad, mint juleps, Miss Paula’s pickled shrimp, and Coca-Cola salad.

None use “margarine,” but “Oleo.” Here, you find the secret to perfect fried chicken — peanut oil and Jesus.

Measurements are open to interpretation. A “handful” here, a “passel” there. A “dash,” a “pinch,” a “dusting,” a “touch.”

Also, there are a dozen variations of chicken-broccoli casserole. The only discernible differences are varying amounts of cheese.

I have a long history with homemade cookbooks. In fact, the article you’re reading was typed on a manual typewriter that once typed a similar cookbook. Many moons ago, I typed 418 recipes using only my index fingers. The recipes were fed through a Xerox machine in the church office.

The finished recipes were placed into position based on pure favoritism, according Mrs. Bellmaker.

Long ago, recipes were not handed down to us by former celebrities with cooking shows. Our recipes came from white-haired oracles who knew how to pronounce “ambrosia” and could make white barbecue sauce blindfolded.

These women transformed cholesterol and flour into miracles and used simple ingredients to cure everything from malaria to a broken heart.

Freely, they leave their wisdom in nondescript cookbooks, similar to the one I am holding.

It belongs to my wife but sits above our oven for quick reference. Time has faded the cover. Inside is the key to happiness, love, life, and the pathway to type-2 diabetes.

I flipped through the pages before writing this. Triple Orange Ambrosia, Red Beans and Rabbit, Miss Genie’s Crack-a-Lackin’ Cheese Biscuits, Miss Ruby Hagood’s Old-Fashioned Tea Cakes.

I will never taste them all, but I can hold them in my hand and think of matriarchs who are on the other side. These are not just old recipes. They are proof God wants his children a little soft in the middle. ■

Columnist