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While trolling for spiral-bound cookbooks in my favorite section of McKay’s Used Books, I found Ernest Mickler’s White Trash Cooking II: Recipes for Gatherins, and had to find Volume I.  Had to order it from Amazon, in fact. 

 It arrived two days ago.  And what a gorgeous thing it is.

So gorgeous that the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, no less,  wrote of it:

I have never seen a sociological document of such beauty — the photographs are shattering.  I shall treasure it always… Now that it’s harder than ever to identify the genuine article on sight — with two generations of prosperity white trash looks like gentry — we’ve long needed something other than the ballot box to remind us of their presence:  White Trash Cooking is a beautiful testament to a stubborn people of proud and poignant heritage. - Harper Lee

It is funny, oh yes: Mock Cooter Stew.  Russian Communist Tea Cakes. Mama Leila’s Hand-Me-Down Oven-Baked Possum.  But the humor is the best kind of all, stemming from a deep and genuine affection — and yes, even respect — for the mamas and aunties who did the best they could, mostly with very little indeed. 

Never in my whole put-together life, writes the author,

Could I write down on paper a hard, fast definition of White Trash… But the first thing you’ve got to understand is that there’s white trash and there’s White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from, you never failed to say “yes ma’m” and “no sir,” never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else’s icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say “thank you” for the teeniest favor. That’s the way the ones before us were raised and that’s the way they raised us in the South.

… But rather than runnin’ around willy-nilly telling stories (which I could do all day long), it might be quicker to get to what I mean by White Trash cooking if, as Betty Sue says, we go straight to the kitchen and “get it did.”

While the Almostgotits aint got much call for fried squirrel in our own Southern household, here’s a coupla good recipes from the book, just in time for the holidays.  If you want more recipes than these, though, you’ll have to order your own copy of White Trash: Amazon sells ‘em used, too!

Plain Ol’ Potato Pone

• 1 cup milk

• 3 medium-size sweet potatoes

• 1 cup of molasses

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

• 3 eggs

• 1/4 stick of oleo

First bake your sweet potatoes, or use some left from supper. Take off the skins and mash them up.  To the potatoes, add all other ingredients.  Mix well and put in an iron skillet and bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.  Now this is a real pone.  Dig in and make yourself at home — if you ain’t, you oughta be. This is another one of Betty Sue’s favorites. (from White Trash Cooking)

Fancy Sweet Potato Pone

• 4 cups raw sweet potatoes (grated)

• 1 cup syrup

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 cup milk

• 1/2 cup butter

• 1/2 cup chopped nuts

• 1 cup raisins

• 3 eggs, well-beaten

• 1 teaspoon allspice

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon cloves

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Add well beaten eggs, sugar, spices, and nuts to grated sweet potato. 

Melt butter in heavy iron frying pan; add potato mixture; Stir all on top of stove until very hot.  Cook in same pan in moderate oven for 45 minutes, stirring from bottom several times.  Serve with whipped cream.

Raenelle said: ‘This is my recipe but Betty Sue added all the extras, so it’s hard to tell it’s the one I gave her.  She’s always changin’ things.’  (also from White Trash Cooking)

One of the best places in the entire city of Knoxville, Tennessee is McKay’s Used Book Store, and one of the best parts of McKay’s is the “club cookbook” section, an endlessly-entertaining collection of plastic comb bindings.   

Most are from Knoxville churches and garden clubs, but several have travelled long and intriguing journeys from far-off places, like Elvira.  

Many of them are quite old.  A few are even mimeographed. Some have food stains on them.   Many are annotated — “bake longer;” “too much salt, use half;” “goes good with pork.“ 

Men cook, too, of course, but these cookbooks are overwhelmingly about women. 

Women created or preserved the recipes; women solicited and collected them; and women sold and bought the cookbooks, some packing up and moving with them all the way from Elvira. 

Or else mailing them from Elvira to their cousins in Knoxville who don’t cook, but kept them on their shelves for several years any way in case of nosy visitors from Elvira.  Who thankfully died, finally, so the damned cookbooks could be shuffled off to McKay’s. 

It’s interesting to see how recipes have changed over the years.  Who makes potato chip sandwiches these days?  Or casseroles, pretty much in general? 

Or maybe women have changed?  I’m trying to figure too many things out, here.  I read these cook books looking for clues about the women who wrote them, but I’m also looking for clues about myself. 

I’m not working very much.  Should I be cooking a lot, instead? 

And do I channel Martha Stewart and use fresh-shaved  parmesan and parchment paper, or should I return to a thriftier era and make tuna casseroles topped with potato chips, instead?

Listen:  this next thing really is related. 

A friend showed me some hand-made Christmas ornaments the other day, which she’d bought from an older woman who laboriously cuts and contructs the tiny, multi-dimensional things from old Christmas cards.  Dips all the tiny little edges in glitter for a slightly tacky additional touch.

My first reaction:  how pitiful, and also a little strange.  A little embarrassing, even.

I would not spend that much time cutting up and re-assembling old Christmas cards.  I’d buy Certified Craft Materials instead, or just buy some cool ornament that had been hand-crafted by an impoverished woman in Peru, even if it were made out of old Christmas cards.

Aha. 

I wonder if being an American, particularly an American woman, is these days basically an impossible proposition. 

What do you think?