As a writer, food lover and former reporter, I look to cookbooks as entry points to a variety of cultures and eras. Ever wonder why Southern cookbooks devote so many pages to dessert? One trip to my husband’s grandmother’s church social in middle Tennessee, with its bountiful tables of cakes and pies, neatly answered that question.
“You never want to bring the same cake as someone else,” Granny told me one frosty December afternoon as she shook her decades-old sifter and prepared to bake a gorgeous, triple layer Italian Cream Cake. I opened the worn pages of her copy of the classic, community-sourced cookbook Dining With 
Pioneers, and saw for myself the scores of options available. Really, there’s no excuse to bring the same cake! (Fans of American history, cakes and baking also should check out All Cakes Considered by NPR’s Melissa Gray. Who wouldn’t want to bake a cake dubbed The Naughty Senator? But that’s another story…).
Cookbooks can help you imagine the geography, topography and demographics of a place. I returned home from a trip to Rhode Island with Barbara Sherman Stetson’s The Island Cookbook, an eclectic collection of homespun recipes that call for all of New England’s native ingredients, traditions and gumption. With an imagined Rhode Island accent, I devoured a chapter on the so-called “Jonnycake Controversy,” a statewide battle over the “proper” way to prepare and cook corn-based hotcakes that their state Legislature eventually attempted to sort out in the 1940s.
As I flip past recipes for Quahog Cakes, Fried Apple Rings and Portuguese Sweet Bread, I’m transported right back outside a seaside lobster roll shack on a gusty fall afternoon or to when I paused to admire the kaleidoscope of autumn leaves that fringed a bucolic grist mill’s rustic water wheel, awaiting fresh, stone-ground cornmeal to make Jonnycakes of my own.
Food writer Karen Gaudette will moderate a panel that features four other food writers at a special The Scoop on Food event to discuss creating and writing about Pacific Northwest cuisine (at the Central Library on Thursday, November 10, at 7 p.m.) Gaudette, who serves as a food writer and editor at PCC Natural Markets, spent the past decade as a journalist and provided food coverage for The Seattle Times. The Scoop on Food is presented in partnership with The Seattle Times. Thank you, Karen, for being our guest blogger today!
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