Vick Frances Brannen - Tales of Texas cooking : stories and recipes from the Trans Pecos to the Piney Woods and High Plains to the Gulf prairies

This Publication of the Texas Folklore Society (#70) was several years in the making, gathering all the ingredients and carefully mixing them together to get this final product. Okay, that was as close to a pun as I'll come when describing what it took to create the book that you hold in your hands. As you can tell, it contains a lot of recipes; however, I trust that you'll come to find that it's much more than a mere cookbook that features the many diverse foods that people from Texas enjoy cooking and eating. This volume contains the lore that explains what is significant about those foods, and why they mean so much to us as a culture. Food is essential to everyone's existence, of course, but the rituals, recipes, and events behind what and how we eat are what bring us together and identify us as a group. Many cultural groups exist in Texas and the Southwest, but by examining the ways those groups celebrate their foods and the customs associated with them proves that the way we process and consume the nutrients vital to our survival is about much more than merely sustaining lifeit's what binds us together.

In addition to a brief Preface, this PTFS includes an Introduction; this first chapter was written by Fran Vick, and it takes a deeper look at the reasoning behind doing an entire publication on this topic. She explains that these recipesand especially the stories behind themprovide insight into intimate memories of family gatherings and loved ones who are no longer with us. The stories also commemorate the customs, rituals, foods, and methods passed down from one generation to another. Many of these works reveal the private feelings and experiences of the contributors, but in the end the food lore represented in this book is something that we can all relate to, in some way or another.

I'm grateful for Fran's efforts, to say the least. As much as I wanted to see this book done, I just couldn't seem to get the types of contributions necessary; Fran asked to take it over, and I gladly accepted her offer. She had apparently been interested in the project from the time I first announced my intentions, and she wanted to take on the role as guest-editor. I turned over the files we had collected, Fran added what she had already, and then she began calling individually on others she knew had something to contribute. You'll find that some of the pieces have been printed elsewhere, either exactly as you see them here, or in another form, with some variation to make them more completely fit our purpose with this publication.

I thank Fran for her hard work on putting this volume together. I also give thanks to all of the contributors who wrote articles for this book. As always, I thank my colleagues and administrators at Stephen F. Austin State University who support the Society's efforts: Mark Sanders, Chair of the Department of English, and Brian Murphy, Dean of the College of Liberal and Applied Arts. I again thank the folks at the UNT Press for their dedication to the Texas Folklore Society and our long tradition of preserving and presenting the lore of Texas and the Southwest.

Although I usually provide some sort of dedication for each PTFS, this time Fran is doing that specifically.

Kenneth L. Untiedt
Stephen F. Austin State University
Nacogdoches, Texas
May 25, 2015