Epicurean Reading

Every year for Christmas, Baird puts a novel in my stocking. He accidentally forgot to bring my stocking stuffers to Iowa this year, leaving me short on reading material for our trip home today. Then I remembered a Christmas present Mom gave me, a cookbook called A Patchwork of Family Favorites. It's Jesup's new cookbook in honor of its sesquicentennial, so I started with that.

In my opinion, if you want insight into a town or organization, you can learn a lot by reading its cookbook. Jesup's cookbook features classic Midwestern Americana cooking, with several nods to its Western European pioneer roots. In a cookbook that celebrates a rural Midwestern town's 150th birthday, you'd expect to find recipes like Old Settlers' Beans and Old Time Sugar Cream Pie, and this book doesn't disappoint. There's also recipes for venison meatloaf and squirrel pot pie, but my favorite "game" section covers pheasant. Shirley Burns wrote, "The most important thing you will do is check to see all the shot is gone. People have a tendency to whine when they break a tooth."

I also found a collection of The Cat Who books in Mom's personal library, and I borrowed this one.

Lilian Jackson Braun is a smart, witty author who spins a great tale about a food writer who lives in an old pottery and ends up solving a murder mystery. Those three threads may not seem like they go together but she makes it all work. The book is great, but the pages that describe the culinary experiences of the food writer are hilarious.

Once we get home I'll start on the third title of this little epicurean book trilogy: Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl.