This article about the demand for cookbooks in New Orleans – made me a bit misty-eyed.
“I am trying to locate ‘Aunt May’s Eggplant Fritters’ published in the Times-Picayune more than 15 years ago. . . . I lost it in my Lakeview home. All of my family members who had this recipe lost it, too. If anyone has this recipe, I would be very grateful if they would pass it on.”
Gulp!!!
Just go read the whole thing. Beautiful article. The image of a woman literally hugging The Joy of Cooking to her … is … KILLING ME. Tradition … the importance of tradition …
sniffle.
She feels worse about losing her mother’s recipes. “She’s got Alzheimer’s now. I know a lot of her recipes, but I’d give anything to have her handwriting.”
It’s the little things, I think, that it would hurt the most to lose.
Irreplaceable.
My Celebrations of the Bayou is one of my most cherished books. I can’t imagine what would happen if my wife lost her index card recipes.
Make copies!!!
That’s what I’m thinking.
Or put them online or something.
Food is an incredibly rich part of the culture in the New Orleans area. I was searching for the new River Roads Recipes for a Christmas present for my wife. It’s the fourth in the series. The lady at the bookstore told me she had the new one but the others had totally sold out because of people replacing their lost ones. Some of them may even be out of print. It’s not the first thing you think about when you’re talking about staggering loss.
Wow, Rob … It would be great if rare book sellers who specialize in cook books could get involved. You know there’s a whole MARKET for “old fashioned” cookbooks out there anyway … These books still probably exist somewhere.
I have a strange hope that the newspaper can track down as many recipes as possible that people request.
River Roads One is very quaint. Recipes like “stewed jay” by Mrs Roy Boudreaux.
There’s this old farm meat-and-potatoes cookbook that was my grandmother’s, who gave it to my mother, and now it belongs to me. It is definitely one of those “if your house was on fire” things. It’s great. If you look up a recipe for chicken, it doesn’t have stuff like chicken marsala avec le fleu de les fromages or anything. It’s just a series of 2D illustrations about how to cut a chicken’s head off and pluck the feathers. If you’re ever looking for a good way to cook squirrel or possum, I’m the go-to girl for recipes.
Mrs. Roy Boudreaux, huh? I love that. There’s a whole world in books like that!!
A real pioneer woman kind of cookbook, Emily!
And we wonder how entire civilizations can be wiped out in one fell swoop.
Somehow it’s the little things like that that break my heart – it’s like, these folks lost their homes and their livelihoods, why should they also have to lose the recipes their grandma wrote out for them?
But yeah, copies. When my mom inherited my grandma’s recipe book (with recipes she wrote in there, and my great-grandma wrote in there, and one of my aunts – now deceased – wrote in there), my dad arranged to have copies made for the various living relatives. (But not the grandchildren, hmph. I’d like my own copy of Grandma’s recipes).
I have a LOT of cookbooks. One of the things I’ve done is scoured the used-book stores for copies of the cookbooks my mom has and used when I was growing up. It’s not quite the same as the actual cookbook, with the gravy stain on page 114 or whatever, but at least I can make the same recipes I remember….
I wonder if somewhere is doing a posting of “these are the books people are searching for”? I’d honestly be happy to part with some of the books out of my collection if it meant that someone who lost everything at least had back a copy of one of the cookbooks they had used and cherished. (But I doubt I’d have any; my cookbooks are pretty Yankee.)