Home Town Cookbooks

 Mine are all from Ohio and all are handed down by grandmas. 

I have three such cookbooks on my countertop right now. Granted, two were given to me by a grandma who lived in Ohio. The third, while actually from Fort Myers, Florida, still has a connection to Ohio. The granddaughter of the author of What's Cookin' at Shell Point (signed "Enjoy, Love Grandma)" was from Granville, Ohio (which is about 30 miles northeast of Columbus). That's enough of a connection for me.

The recipes to be found in these cookbooks are strange to me. I have never lived in Ohio although I had family there and visited many times over a lifetime. I have eaten at Skyline Chili so while I have an appreciation for weird, these cookbooks use ingredients I would, today, neither fathom using nor promote using.

Here is a sampling of the table of contents from What's Cookin':

• Chicken and Biscuits (which includes the instruction "make your own biscuits. . . . "
• One-Step Crockpot Stew (which is comprised of 7 steps - 8, if you include "Do not peek!")
• Bacon-Cheese Onion Things (There's really no better way to describe this.)
• Zucchini Surprise (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there's always a "surprise" in any hometown cookbook.)
• Taffy Apple Salad (While I didn't find a salad in this cookbook that contained mini-marshmallows, I did find this one which included Cool Whip. It did not, ironically, include taffy.)
• I skipped the chapter on seafood intentionally. (I have been to Ohio.)

For more down-home goodness, I present a sampling of the contents from John Paulding Historical Society Cook Book + Recipes + Reflections signed by Grandma R. with the words of "I love you" in 1992:

• Brides Punch (which includes orange juice, can frozen lemonade, can pineapple juice, quart ginger ale plus two cups of sugar!) [emphasis mine]
• Cornmeal Mush with Tomato Gravy (This doesn't even sound appetizing. I read the recipe and my opinion did not change.)
• Fireside Supper ("Fireside" is not mentioned anywhere in the recipe except the title.)
• Sinful Potatoes (which includes Velveeta cheese and a jar of Miracle Whip which sounds pretty sinful to me.)
• Overnight Fruit Salad (This one includes mini-marshmallows but no actual fruit other than canned.)
• There are a lot of recipes in this one for "balls" in Appetizers, Main Dishes, and Desserts, but I din't find any "surprises."

Cooking with Friends also comes from Paulding, Ohio. The inscription is dated 1997. 

• Under the heading of Appetizers, the reader is advised that appetizers are treats that can be served before a meal, at an open house, or at a reception. The first example was "Caviar flavored with onion juice." I skipped the rest of this section.
• It surprises me what passes for salad but it often includes Cool Whip, sugar, or cream cheese or some combination thereof. Canned pineapple is also featured.
• Mystery Crackers are made of oyster crackers, buttery popping oil, and two packages of Lipton Cup-A-Soup mixed together. The mystery is "why?"
• There are five pages in the Vegetables section of this cookbook. In all recipes, the vegetables are disguised by ingredients such as Ritz crackers, grated cheese, sour cream, Jiffy corn muffin mix, Velveeta, corn flakes, boxed stuffing mix, Marshmallow Cream, Cheese Whiz, Bisquick, and a variety of canned soups.
• There are 20 pages in the Cakes, Cookies & Confections section. This is separate from another 10 pages of Desserts.
• Cream Cheese Pound Cake contains only a half pound of cream cheese.
• Honeymoon Cake will likely lead to diabetes and/or divorce. Its main ingredient is one pound of fruit cocktail and is topped with coconut-pecan frosting and whipped cream. If that doesn't do it, try Coffee Marshmallow Cake made of marshmallows, whipped cream, vanilla wagers, plus sugar.
• In the Beverages section, there's a recipe for Party Punch. Even as a kid, I knew there was something inherently wrong with a beverage that included Jell-o, fruit juice concentrate, ginger ale, and sherbet all mixed together and served in a punch bowl, served with a glass ladle into little glass cups. Was it supposed to be elegant or decadent? What's more is no parent ever stopped their child from drinking it. That's midwestern goodness right there.

What I love about hometown cookbooks is their down-home-ness. They represents comfort food from the heartland. They are recipes passed down from generation to generation, preserved in a book that no granddaughter has ever referenced. Either she already knows these recipes, having grown up with them, or she has moved out of Ohio and developed different culinary tastes. Nevertheless, these books contain the love of grandmas and so live on in kitchens everywhere. 

They aren't as much about the recipes as the people behind them. And, that's the best ingredient of all.