In the 1920’s and ’30’s, my grandparents farmed in Freedom Township, which is a rural area east of Emmetsburg, Iowa. According to family legend, when Charles Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and landed in Paris, my grandfather set his wind generator-powered radio in front of the speaker of the party-line telephone so all their farm neighbors could listen to the news as it happened in those days before rural electrification.

I love that story because it it points out how less than a hundred years ago we lacked the basic infrastructure needed to now spend, for the first time in human existence, the majority of every waking minute of our lives engaged in consuming some form of mass communication.

In a fascinating podcast from The Food Programme on BBC Radio, Chef Magnus Nilsson makes the case that he believes the world’s most diverse baking culture can be found in the Nordic countries because the populations of those countries were so isolated and spread out that information spread very slowly. If one home cook came up with a highly individualized recipe or technique, that innovation might spread only a few miles by being handed down through the generations. Perhaps unique and highly local traditions were not bulldozered if the residents were not targeted by marketers to replace anything old with anything new?

I sometimes like to look through old community cookbooks because I hold onto the hope that I will find some lost gem of a recipe that was the unique creation of a gifted cook from the past living in a small town in the Upper Midwest of my heritage. I am usually disappointed. Most often, the recipes in community cook books are pretty universal, with only slight variations made by the individual cooks.

I recently stopped by a wonderful used book store in Mankato, Minnesota called Once Read Books and purchased the 1871-1971 Centennial Cook Book of The Albion Lutheran Church of St. James, Minnesota. It’s a terrific book and the Scandinavian section features a lot of legit Minnesota prairie recipes for Kringla, Ebelskivers, Ostkaka, and Berlinerkranser.

But a lot of the other recipes with intriguing names like Poinsettia Salad from the prolific Gladys Brekken Siem and Everlasting Salad from Tillie Frederickson turn up dozens of variations with a quick Google search.

I then made a trip to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa’s Main Library to reclaim a piece of family history by examining the 1934 Freedom Township Women’s Club Cook Book. While there were very few commercially prepared ingredients used in that book (the Albion Lutheran Church book published in 1971 uses scads of them like the beverage made by Gladys Brekken Siem that is made up of two parts Hawaiian Punch to one part Fresca), I found that many of the recipes, like the Lady Baltimore Cake of Mrs. Frank Goddard and the Food For The Gods of Edna High were all commonly known all across the United States.

It may be that I’m missing a larger point about community cook books, especially ones made in the prairie towns of the Upper Midwest. It may be that what drove people to record and share something central to their lives was the desire to feel connected.

There was a phenomenon known as “Prairie Madness” in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. People living in isolation on the Great Plains could fall into deep states of depression. It was a very commonly known condition and an entire genre of fiction sprang up, exemplified by Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers!” and the silent film “The Wind” starring Lillian Gish.

It may be that the authors of these community cook books wanted to record for posterity evidence that they had more connection to the world than their first-hand experience. Homemaker shows broadcast on the radio and the Ladies Home Journal were a way to experience a taste of the world beyond the kitchen window and recording your own refinements to famous recipes was a way of demonstrating that you were someone who was tuned in and participating in the zeitgeist.

Some of the recipes in the 1934 book have an international flair to them and come from parts of the world without any cultural heritage connection to the authors. While the recipes may seem off-the-mark to a modern sensibility, I think the authors had an appreciation for the world beyond their localities and wanted there to be a record that they explored the world in their own way and brought back a little treasure to their towns.

It may be that the current desire for the hyper-local in food is a reaction against being bombarded by mass media – a mass media that has been manipulated at various times by the likes of Joseph Goebbels, Mad Men, and Cambridge Analytica. Some people are craving authenticity and feel a need to put up a defense against people who poison the desire for connectivity. Maybe focusing on the local is a way of giving the finger to the Hidden Persuaders, at least in some small way? There are a lot of little zeitgeists to choose from now.

So I will continue to enjoy looking through old community cookbooks and appreciate them for what they are. I won’t be too disappointed if I never find that hidden gem from a forgotten foodie auteur. My sensibility may be different from what motivated the authors of those books.

But I am going to try making the Keokuk Pie from Mrs. C.J. Miller from the 1934 Freedom Township Women’s Club. Google didn’t turn up a thing about that one!

The favorite pie of my brothers and I came from this cookbook which my mom inherited from her mom who belonged to the women’s group that created it. After my mom passed away about 15 years ago, the cookbook was lost in a family tragedy – it went to my oldest brother.

I decided to see what I could turn up. Using the internet to search for a community cookbook produced in a rural area in far North Central Iowa in the early 1930’s was not as much of a long shot as it might sound. In those pre-World War II days, the name of this particular women’s club was The Swastika Club.

Before the ancient symbol of the swastika was co-opted by the Nazis – which right-wing hate groups continue to do with all sorts of imagery today – the symbol was fairly generically used to mean good luck. Ladies Home Journal established Swastika clubs for young ladies in the early 1900’s to earn money by selling magazine subscriptions. The club my grandmother belonged to, in a rural area east of Emmetsburg, Iowa, was created in 1923 in order to disseminate practical home management information from The Farm Bureau and The County Extension Service.

The club changed their name in 1942 and continued to function until 1989 when the members decided to disband and give all their club records to the Iowa Women’s Archives in the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa’s Main Library. Today, I made a trip to Iowa City to reclaim a piece of my past with the generous help of a librarian named Anna.

The lady at the bottom of the page, Florence Kerber, was my grandmother and this raisin cream pie was my favorite one growing up. I’ll just have to add a meringue topping and whatever pie crust I choose.

It’s a wonderful cookbook and I took as many photos as possible. I found club records listing my mom and uncles as children participating in the programs and a poem that mentioned my grandmother’s distinctive laugh.

I’m looking forward to making this pie and other recipes from the book like “Keokuk Pie” and “Dumb Dumplings.” I wonder if the flavor will match my memory? More to come…

I don’t know why this was the thing I wanted to save from the farm but it was. As all the things were being packed up or sold off or thrown away, this was the thing I wanted to remind me of the farm I grew up on.

It’s not a very practical thing to lug around. It’s top heavy. It weighs a lot. I’ve pretty much lugged it around myself. I’ve never used it these last 20 years.

I remember when Dad got it in the summer of 1977, just before I turned 15. I don’t know where he found it or why he thought it was important, but I went with him to pick it up from a guy who repaired it on a farm a ways north of Highway 18 and a few miles east of Highway 15, just north of Whittemore, Iowa. I seem to remember Dad paid about $300 for it.

In hindsight, it was not a very practical thing to buy. In a few short years he would be getting eaten alive by 21% interest rates during The Farm Crisis. We only had two small apple trees in the backyard and only one made juice worth drinking. But for the next few years, for a few short weeks, the sweet, tangy, fleeting taste of summer ending was something Mom, Dad and I created and enjoyed together.

I’m at about the same age now as Dad was then. I was a small business owner when the economic meltdown of 2008-2009 hit and I got beaten up in ways I haven’t recovered from. The Farm Crisis of the ’80s was no more his fault than The Great Recession was mine, but it does seem like I’m reliving a pattern not of my making. I’ve been lugging that around for a lot of years too.

Once in a while I’ll get a brief flash of memory of what it was like to be that 15 year old who had potential. I suppose the hiring managers who are almost half my age are embarrassed for me now.

I’m not ready to give up even if others do not see me as having value. I’ll keep that cider press with me. It still has the potential to create something special.

I like being a home cook. People mean it as a compliment when they say, “You could sell this,” or, “You should enter a contest,” but I think, maybe, what’s behind that – unconsciously – is the notion that what you’re doing is not valid unless you are doing it to make money or to dominate someone else. I mean, you can’t do cooking because it makes you happy, right?

During a recent podcast of The Food Programme from the BBC, the founder of the Moley Robotic Kitchen, Mark Olynik, described how people will be able to download a dish from a celebrity chef for a small fee just like downloading a song. His kitchen robot will then be able to cook the dish exactly like the celebrity chef has specified. He said it will eliminate boring food preparation and give you more time to spend on something that will make you happy.

Moley Robotic Kitchen has teamed with Tim Anderson, a past winner of the BBC show MasterChef, and has programmed a robot to copy him making a dish the same way Hollywood copies an actor’s movements when creating animated special effects. Anderson said that a robot could be programmed for fine dining or for nostalgic cooking. He said that if a robot could be programmed to make Wisconsin Beer Cheese Soup the way he remembered, it would make him happy.

It’s interesting that both men gave “Happiness” as a reason for robots taking over the role of cooking. According to one British Columbian study, out of 66 leisure activities that contribute to a person’s sense of well-being, cooking was the best predictor of happiness. A study of amateur chefs reported that cooking allowed them to express their creativity and feel good about themselves.

Grocery industry researcher Eddie Yoon reports that 90% of Americans either hate to cook or are lukewarm about it, yet the British Columbian study shows that cooking as a leisure activity is the best predictor of happiness. What gives? People are fascinated by what they see on TV about cooking, but TV cooking is mostly about the spectacle of food warriors in combat and not about real people creating dishes in real kitchens. Madison Avenue has drilled the message that “cooking is drudgery” into American minds for decades and they have been successful in convincing people that home cooking is a chore and a waste of leisure time.

McDonalds has a commercial out for their delivery service that says, “We deliver Happy.” Like rats on the hedonic treadmill, advertisers want to brain wash people into giving up an activity that will actually make them happy in order to be a consumer of something that will make them less and less happy over time.

There’s a school of thought that says people need three things for psychological health:

• Autonomy: feeling in control of behavior and goals.
• Competence: gaining mastery of tasks or skills.
• Relatedness: feeling a sense of belonging or attachment to others.

Being a home cook satisfies the first two criteria and the act of cooking for others satisfies the third. There’s a real chance that home cooking will become a niche hobby like knitting. What will we lose by giving up a creative activity that gives us real happiness for yet another consumer activity that leaves us empty?

Michalos, C.A. (2005). Arts and the quality of life: An exploratory study. Social Indicators Research, 71, 11-59.

Daniel, M., Guttmann, Y., Raviv, A. (2011).  Cooking and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: A qualitative analysis of amateur chefs’ perspectives. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 1 No. 20

https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-grocery-industry-confronts-a-new-problem-only-10-of-americans-love-cooking