An Old Book!

A good friend of mine always brought such.... interesting food to our church potlucks. And I don't mean interesting in a bad way. Like when someone asks you how you like their new haircut and you say, "Well, it's interesting." I mean interesting in the way that it was good food that I've never had before. It was different, but good.  Like this green bean salad with walnuts and blue cheese. And she also had this corn bread salad that was really good. I asked her once where she got her recipes and she said she got a lot of them from this cookbook.

You can tell it's an old cookbook. It's put out by the Junior League of Jackson, Mississippi. The copyright is 1978. Anyhow, so I immediately ordered it and I had to get it used. It came in a timely fashion, but as soon as I opened the box the binding disintegrated and  now it looks like this.

It's actually a really big cookbook. It 400 pages and no pictures. Some of the recipes are really interesting. You can cook "Excellent Rabbit" and "Squirrel Mulligan". There's also a recipe for "Congealed Broccoli" and you can make your fig preserves peeled or unpeeled. There's a recipe for both. There are some that look good like "Mississippi Spice Muffins" and "Bacon Spoon Bread". Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to really go through the book like I'd like to. It's actually pretty overwhelming.  And, I'm kind of nervous. I know the things D made were good, but.... this book is written by a bunch of Southern women and well... I'm not sure if I'd like Southern food. Shoot, they have like a dozen recipes for gumbo. And a big ol' section on wild game.  Betty Crocker has about 2 pages of recipes for game.  But, there are some things I find fascinating about the book itself.  One is that all the ladies who contributed signed it using "Mrs." and then their husband's name.  So, we have recipes from Mrs. Donald Lutken and Mrs. Julian Henderson.  Another thing about buying a cookbook used as opposed to new is that someone has already gone through it and a lot of women mark up their cookbooks. They make substitutions and evaluations.

The lady who had this before me did a little of that. She also put check-marks by recipes she liked. Although this one....

You can tell this was a good recipe in her mind. It got a star and an "excellent". I may just have to make that one!