The pages were broken from the spine and the cover was tattered, with one corner gone. He placed it beside the new reproduction, crisp and gleaming, the words of the original book handsomely reproduced against a background of faded wallpaper – “The Cook’s Friend and Home Guide – Compiled and Published by the Ladies Aid Society of the M.E. Church, Jollytown, PA 1906,” underscored by the prim caveat – “She is the best cook who prepares the most palatable, nutritious food at the least expense.”
“This was with some family’s stuff from my mother’s side. I’ve had it for years and always meant to have it redone and give it to Cornerstone for a fundraiser.” Cole said. “Well now I have, so I can cross it off my list. Except for the cover, everything else is just like the original – just the way they wrote it.”
Cornerstone Genealogical Society, in its restored, original log cabin county courthouse on 44 East Greene Street, Waynesburg, is the perfect place to shop for this little gem of history distilled in recipes that serve up generous portions of the way life used to be.
When it comes to looking into the past, few things can beat an old church cookbook – especially one that includes essays on the meaning of life in the not-so-fast lane at the beginning of the last century, in the miles-from-anywhere village of Jollytown. Or Centerville, depending on how far back you want to go.
For Cole and some of the other families whose ancestors settled along the banks of Dunkard Creek where West Virginia is just over the hill, that history goes back to 1821 to settler Titus Jolly, then moves forward through grist mills, self sufficiency and the Civil War, to marching bands, a monument to the county’s first lost Civil War soldier Jesse Taylor and the early 20th century when the town finally built a new Methodist church and this cookbook was born.
The names on the recipes are a litany of the names people travel from many states to research as they trace their ancestry to the founding families of Greene County – Clovis, Fordyce, Cole, Hennen, Dye, Phillips, Shriver, Fox, Garrison, Rice andWise.
But whatever the family, these recipes, cleaning, gardening, chicken tending, bug killing tips, and philosophical musings, overflow with common sense truth.
A star of the book is Tina Hennen, educated at Monongalia College in Jefferson and author of the essay Home Life on the Farm, sandwiched near the back of the book between Insecticides and Soap Making and the Use and Abuse of the Medicine Cabinet.
She never married and lived out her life in the family log cabin, summing up in words the world these recipes describe – “you house your stock, eat your store of good things while enjoying seasonable pleasures until some day the frozen frigid temperature gives way to approaching springtime and Presto, we are again at our beginning.”
Cook’s Friend begins in ordinary cookbook fashion with a soup section, then fish. It’s here that the serious business of tip sharing begins – how to clean a fish without damaging either gill or liver. The meat section jumps right in with how to cure pork, boil hog heads for scrapple, smoke hams and keep meat fresh in warm weather – “take one ounce saltpeter and one pound of sugar…”
Everything that could be grown in the garden gets its due, especially potatoes – hashed, baked, puffed, scalloped – and made into salad. Uncommon desserts almost lost to time are revived here – brown Betty, satchel cake, snow pudding, vinegar pie.
It’s here that the directions get really down home – butter the size of a walnut or an egg, (how big was the chicken you might wonder…) “make it as you generally would,” quick ovens and slow bake. These were women well seasoned in feeding thrashing crews and gaggles of offspring and neighbor kids, attending church socials and entertaining friends.
They knew how to manage a woodstove, take care of stink bugs “a borax mixture is a sure remedy” or make a checkerboard cake without a mold. The occasional appearance of pineapples, bananas, coconuts and oranges in recipes must have seemed exotic then against this backdrop of everyday fixings.
But the real show stopper is how these cooks leavened, with homemade yeasts pulled out of thin air, sourdoughs captured in potato water, ammonia and milk to make crackers, store bought yeast tempered with hops, guaranteed to last a month.
The smell of salt rising bread was said to drive kids straight out of the kitchen, just as the hickory and sawdust scent of the smoke- house was enough to draw them in.
The memories captured in this little book are alive and well and sometimes still practiced by the descendants of those who submitted their handwritten contributions for publication in 1906.
“You went in the garden and you picked it and you brought it in and cleaned it, cooked it and ate it.” Martha Eakin Patterson said. She sat on the big breezy wraparound porch built by her grandfather, John Pierce Eakin, in 1910.
Patterson is a lively 88-year-old in shorts and tennis shoes, surrounded by the mowed fields of the family farm just outside of town. “I don’t remember when I learned to cook. I had five kids and I cooked just about everything. But my cooking days are behind me. My daughter Pat is the cook now.”
Patterson’s family tree includes names attached to these recipes – Eakin, Clovis, Hennen and Hagan. William Clovis was county commissioner in 1887 and the wives of the extended Clovis clan take the cake for contributions, including a five-page treatise on chickens by Mrs. A.J. Clovis, ending with “If space and time did not forbid we would like to tell you many other things which you may learn by studying your fowls and being in love with your work.”
The two recipes for mincemeat pies don’t mention Patterson’s mother’s secret ingredient – homemade wine. “I always got the job of picking the meat off the bone. My mother made mincemeat and she always put in a little extra wine but I still never liked it,” Patterson remembered, grinning.
“But you ate what was put on your plate. We always had plenty of apples, and milk and eggs. You used what you had. We baked our own pies, bread and cakes, everything. And jelly. I was always peeling something. Out in our cellar (it was a cave) we kept our potatoes and cabbages, parsnips and turnips. We never butchered just one hog. The neighbors came over and helped. You can look at pictures from the past but you really don’t know unless you lived it. You just don’t.”
“We sold 11 today,” Cornerstone volunteer Marilyn Kerr said, beaming. “People come in and buy five or six at a time and they’re trying some of the recipes.”
“Whoever heard of fried cucumbers?” Marilyn Eichenlaub of Waynesburg said. “So I tried them and they were good. It didn’t tell you the temperature to fry them but then these women didn’t have any way of knowing, did they? They just tell you the ingredients and what to do. It’s up to us to know the rest.”
