For 'When Southern Women Cook,' an ode to community cookbooks

When nostalgia, grief and comfort food collide in an ice-cold library in Waco.

I contributed an essay about community cookbooks to a new book called ‘When Southern Women Cook’ from the editors of America’s Test Kitchen.

Like the spiral plastic that often binds them, I’ve been weaving in and out of community cookbooks for more than 15 years now.

And this year, I published two pieces that showcase why I love these little books that have become keepers of family and community lore.

This community cookbook story is published in the December issue of the Texas Co-op Power magazine’s Bluebonnet section.

The first is a story about the history of food in the Bluebonnet region, a 14-county area east of Austin that has its own pages in the Texas Co-op Power magazine. I told that sweeping story through the lens of the region’s community cookbooks, many of which are housed at the Texas Collection at Baylor University.

I made two trips to Waco during the searing hot weeks of August, and in the frigid reading room, I stepped into one of my favorite time-traveling machines: community cookbooks that are assembled through schools, nursing homes, church groups, and garden clubs, often as a fundraiser, for which these kinds of books have been used since the Civil War.

It’s a story I’ve been telling for a long time.

And this fall, I got to tell another version of it for a new cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen called “When Southern Women Cook.”

More than 70 women contributed to this new book from America’s Test Kitchen.

I’m one of about 70 contributors who submitted recipes and stories about the Southern food experience. I have never quite felt Southern, but editor Toni Tipton-Martin, the former Austinite and James Beard-winning author who now leads the Cook’s Country division at ATK, knew that this story about community cookbooks — especially considered their association with the Junior League, which is popular in the South — belonged in a book about Southern food history and culture.

Both of these community cookbook projects were published within a few weeks of one another, a coincidence I didn’t see coming when I was working on both of them at various times in the past year.

But the timing ahead of the holiday season couldn’t be better.

A long time ago, I realized that my love of this subject comes from the handmade cookbook that my mom made exactly 20 Christmases ago. When she decided to put her own name in print, alongside the names of Aunt Elsie, who the book reminds us liked to make lemon cake, and Aunt Mary, whose gardening prowess lives on all these years after her death in her squash casserole.

My mom made this family cookbook in 2004.

That is the crux of the community cookbook love for me: It’s another form of paying homage that evokes a completely different experience than, say, visiting their grave.

I’m always amazed that I can have this feeling while looking at community cookbooks to which I have no personal connection.