The Old Black Cookbook

by Lee C. Kirk

The Prints & The Paper

Cookbooks cram my kitchen bookcase. The titles change constantly as I replace old volumes with examples that reflect my current culinary interests. But standing tall between newer, more colorful covers is a shabby, spineless, stained, and tattered old volume known in the family as “the old black cookbook.” It is the one thing my oldest daughter, Robin, asked for when she got married. It is the one thing I had to deny her, although I later found a copy in an antique store and sent it to her.

It took a while for me to figure out why I couldn’t part with it. My mother had given me the cookbook when I got married. Officially titled the Good Housekeeping Cook Book, it had taught me most of what I knew about cooking. I could flip it open to any topic without referring to the index. Many of its recipes were old favorites. But my attachment went deeper than that. Family memories, I realized, were stuck to its pages with fruit juice and shortening and sugar, more evocative than any album of photographs. The cookbook was a twenty-five-year chronicle of our lives.

A dozen more years have passed, but the cookbook is still on the shelf. I slip it into my hands, and it falls open to pages that make me smile. Did I ever really need a recipe for pot roast or pork chops? In the earliest days of marriage, of course, we had little money for such luxuries. The festive recipes then included hamburger or chicken or fish, all terribly cheap. Daily fare most often featured rice or macaroni or cheese. A quick flip to the cheese pages, and I am transported to a time before children arrived, to a place far away: to a time and a place where these recipes for Welsh Rabbit and Cheese-Onion Pie were in constant use. And here is the old favorite “payday special” (meaning the day before payday) — Baked Cheese Pudding. I see my notations that halve the ingredients to make the recipe suitable for two.

I leap ahead a few pages and a decade of time, and I’m in “eggs” — a section that saw heavy use during the years that my younger daughter, Erin, raised chickens in 4H. Nearly every recipe on these pages is familiar, from Deviled Eggs to Eggs Divan, from Eggs Foo Young to omelettes. I flip to the dessert section and find the recipes for eclairs and custards that saved us from total inundation not only by eggs, but by milk. Those were also the years that both girls raised dairy goats.

The kitchen aromas of that period seem to waft from these pages: the sour scent of milk being made into cheese or yogurt; the sweet fruity smells of peaches, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, or plums, bubbling into jams and jellies; pungent cinnamon and cloves in simmering apple butter; soups and rich stews fragrant with our home-grown tomatoes, corn, peas, snap beans, potatoes, onions, garlic, and herbs; the mouth-watering aroma of baking bread; the savory scent of the spicy ketchup I simmered on the stove all day, half-gone from “sampling” by the time it was done. The old black cookbook was often open on the counter, its pages dusted with flour or spattered with fruit.

The pages of the pie section are among the most soiled and heavily used, a testimonial to holidays with memories encrusted in pumpkin and mince meat and apples. Among the cake recipes I find old birthdays, bake sales, grange dinners, potlucks, company meals.

Drop it, and the old black cookbook flops open at the cookie pages. I must have baked these brownies and chocolate chip cookies hundreds of times. My notes

run alongside, doubling the ingredients. The page with the huge brown splot was Erin’s doing, a spill during her first experiments with baking.

Freezing, canning, carving, converting — I learned them all from this book, and passed what I learned to my daughters. And although I rarely refer to it these days, the old black cookbook has a permanent place on my shelves.