Barbara Swell, Take Two & Butter 'Em While They're Hot!: Heirloom
Recipes & Kitchen Wisdom (Native Ground Music, 1998)
Barbara Swell, Secrets of
the Great Old-Timey Cooks (Native Ground Music, 2001)
Barbara Swell,
Mama's In
The Kitchen: ~ Weird & Wonderful Home Cookin' 1900-1950~ (Native
Ground Music, 2002)
Together, these three books pretty much cover North American cookery and homemaking from the latter third of the 19th century to 1950. This was a period in which the average kitchen moved from cookfires to stoves fueled with wood, coal, gas, electricity or propane.
Take Two & Butter 'Em While They're Hot!: Heirloom Recipes & Kitchen Wisdom has quite a variety of recipes, from stew to biscuits to casseroles to cookies. They represent many of the immigrant groups who were settling in North America in the late 19th century, not just those from the British Isles. You'll find rosti and torta, lebkuchen and rugeleh. Snippets of folklore serve as fillers. After the recipes, there are sections on romance, folk remedies, chores, hearth crafts and weather lore. For those interested in growing their own heirloom vegetables, there is even a list of companies that sell the right seeds.
Secrets of the Great Old-Timey Cooks first introduces us to several of Barbara Swell's heroines, great country cooks she has known. Then there is a section on cooking on a wood stove (accurate, too, if memory serves -- that's what I learned to cook on). Next come the recipes, and finally the usual sections on folklore and folk remedies.
Unlike the other two books, Mama's In The Kitchen: ~ Weird & Wonderful Home Cookin' 1900-1950~ is arranged chronologically. It focuses on the food fashions of each decade. In the years from 1900 to 1919, urbanization was taking hold. More people could buy things instead of growing or raising them, and the manufacturers did their best to tempt them into doing so with their advertising cookbooks. It was mostly a time of plenty, until WWI and rationing. In the 1920s, the war was over, prosperity was back, women in many countries had the vote and science was becoming even more involved in cookery. Vitamins were discovered, and manufacturers scampered to tell everybody how many were in their prepared foods. The 1930s were another make-do era of because of the Depression. The war years were worse because of rationing, but then the war was over, the menfolk were home, the women were back in the kitchen, and all the energy and creativity the latter had used outside the home during the war were suddenly channeled into bizarre food. Mama's In The Kitchen: ~ Weird & Wonderful Home Cookin' 1900-1950~ has a whole chapter on weird little sandwiches, and a much longer one on foods that wiggle. There are also a few things that nobody in their right mind would eat these days (watercress sherbet, anyone?), and then the usual chapters on household lore and remedies.
These three slim volumes -- 72 pages each -- are treasuries of North American folklore and history, a glimpse into how people lived not so very long ago. They're also full of delectable (and otherwise) recipes, including the ORIGINAL Toll House cookies (Mama's In The Kitchen, page 39).
Many of the recipes have been modified at least somewhat for modern ingredients and equipment. Sometimes both the original and the modern directions are given. All three books are copiously illustrated in black and white. Barbara Swell uses old photographs, many from collections such as those of the Library of Congress and of various universities and state historical societies, as well as a great number of pictures from the old books and magazines she quotes.
Mama's In The Kitchen has a bibliography, but the other two volumes have "credits" instead. All three have indexes. Take Two & Butter 'Em While They're Hot! also has several pages for the reader's own family recipes.
Barbara Swell is the author of several other collections of old-time recipes and household hints.
They are all published by Native Ground Music, her husband Wayne Erbsen's company, which also publishes songbooks, musical instruction books and recordings related to the southern Appalachians or to railroads.
