The Elder Statesman

By Bill Duncan
The View From Here

I am a soupmaker and hardly a week goes by that I don’t have a large soup pot on the stove with nutritious ingredients boiling away and making the whole house smell like my mother’s kitchen. The one I remember most had a wood cookstove for which as a boy I had to chop kindling.

I was born in the late ’20s just ahead of the Great Depression. I was a carefree lad growing up in the Deep South, so memories of the Depression-era are not ones of hunger. I truly don’t know how my mother did it because there were six of us children to feed and money certainly wasn’t plentiful.

I do know that in those times, women were creative cooks. They had to be, because the supermarket of the day was the small green grocer around the corner with a limited stock — mostly a meat counter, canned goods and fresh produce. Food was prepared from scratch, it didn’t come from the frozen food case already prepared and waiting for the microwave oven.

However, for the price of a single ready-prepared meal of today, one could buy a week’s groceries. Could we ever return to that day when mothers prepared meals from scratch? Patricia R. Wagner, a freelance artist and writer who lives on a small tree farm in Stanchfield, Minn., with her husband, Robert, and two sons, truly believes we can, and from the sales of her cookbook, “Depression Era Recipes,” now in it’s 21st printing, one would have to agree.

Perhaps like me, the reader only wants to reminisce about the good old days — indeed they were good in many respects.

It is no mystery to me where Wagner dug up all the Depression-era recipes because over the years I too have collected old cookbooks — mainly looking for soup recipes to add to my own Soup Recipe Book, a homemade affair with handwritten copies of recipes, newspaper clippings, magazine clippings and a few from old friends and family.

A friend, the late Jules Stephens, gave me a priceless cookbook called “Dining Room and Kitchen,” written by Grace Townsend in 1894. Her byline reads “Mrs. Grace Townsend.” The book is a compendium of “the choicest tried and approved cookery recipes.”

In a used book store I purchased a bound copy of the Royal Baking Powder Co. book “Any One Can Bake,” copyright 1927 when it sold for $2. I paid considerably more for this prize book, which interestly was originally owned, according to an inscription on the flyleaf, by Mrs. A. G. Mitchell of Inglewood, Calif. The inscription is dated 1928.

In Mrs. Mitchell’s handwriting on the front flyleaf is a recipe for orange pudding and on the back three blank pages in the book are her handwritten recipes for chocolate cake, curry pickles and gold cake.

In another used book store I found a 1939 volume of “Cooking With Foreign Flavor,” by Florence La Ganke Harris, one I bought especially for its soup recipes, but found other recipes from around the world intriguing as well.

The origin of Wagner’s “Depression Era Recipes,” she says, “for the most part came from brittle, hand-written recipe books” she found.

“This wasn’t just a matter of typing up old recipes,” she said. “There was an incredible amount of research involved. I learned so much from this effort that it was like taking a history class.”

I don’t see America returning to that cooking from scratch era and making things stretch, but perhaps it would be good to teach that style of cooking in high school today. Home Ec? Guess not in the 21st century when such suggestions are politically incorrect.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or at the demand of his readers, by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com and he will accept soup recipes)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.