THE BLUE GRASS COOKBOOK Now Available for Recipes from Johnny Cakes to Baked Apple Dumplings

The image of Southern hospitality is one that many conjure up when they think about the gentility of the antebellum period. Chief among these is that of the southern kitchen, where sorghum molasses, drop biscuits, and succulent cured hams find their way to a table full of chatting people and, inevitably, to satisfied stomachs. For almost two hundred years, Kentucky cooks have been playing their part, continuing to feed their families and lucky guests with time-honored recipes handed down for generations. 

In The Blue Grass Cook Book, originally published in 1904, Minnie C. Fox compiled over 300 favorite recipes from family and friends, including black cooks, near her Bourbon County, Kentucky, family estate and her home in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. From Johnny Cake to Kentucky Burgout to Baked Apple Dumplings, the recipes found in The Blue Grass Cook Book bring traditional turn-of-the-century southern cuisine to your table. Including introductions from John Fox Jr.-Minnie's brother and popular novelist-and Toni Tipton-Martin, this paperback edition of The Blue Grass Cook Book provides a closer look at the unique relationship between the tradition of white southern hospitality and the black cooks who made it possible.

Tipton-Martin notes that at the time of the book'spublishing, most of the cookbooks that did mention black cooks did so to appeal to those who missed the days of antebellum slavery, mingling "fine old Dixie dishes" with demoralizing etchings of slaves at work, vernacular language, and lyrics from spirituals and hymns. The book's 1904 New York Times review even echoes that sentiment, stating that "The colored race may not be credited with originality, but they are wonderfully imitative." The Fox family, however, gives credit where credit is due. In a salutary redress to the African American descendants of generations of invisible cooks, they provide an honest and revealing picture of the state of culinary affairs in the South at the start of the twentieth century.

Over a century later, many of the recipes serve as interesting historical landmarks ("How to Dress Terrapin," for example), but many others can still be prepared using ingredients and methods common in today's kitchen, including "Henry Clay's Favorite Dish"-stewed rump roast with carrots and beef gravy. The Blue Grass Cook Book brings new light to a neglected classic and offers a nuanced portrait of a unique and now-vanished culinary culture.

Toni Tipton-Martin is the past president of the Southern Foodways Alliance and coauthor of A Taste of Heritage: New African American Cuisine.

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