Showalter - Mennonite community cookbook: favorite family recipes

B RACKBILL , professor at Eastern Mennonite College, Harrisonburg, Virginia, who took the colored photographs.

• The typists, M ERNA and R OSALYN B RENNEMAN , Harrisonburg, Virginia, who typed the manuscript.
• My family and friends, who encouraged me during the months and years of work required in producing this book.

They always had such delicious things to eat, and I noticed that they too frequently referred to quaint little hand-written notebooks similar to my mothers. As a student in high school I took home economics and was delighted to learn of many new and beautifully illustrated cookbooks. The time had come when I felt I had outgrown that old-time notebook; so I pushed it aside while I tried out new recipes. Then came college days and frequent visits to my roommates home in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In the heart of that region, where Pennsylvania Dutch cookery abounds, I suddenly became aware of the fact that hand-written notebooks of recipes were still in use. My first position after finishing college took me throughout the United States.

En route I chanced to visit numerous Mennonite communities. I soon began to observe that wherever I went, to California or Colorado, to Iowa or Ohio, our cooking was much the same. Some of the recipes that my mother had recorded in her little book were being used even in the Far West. Since a cookbook of the favorite recipes of Mennonite families had never been published, I now began to sense that the handwritten recipe books were responsible. I asked to see them wherever I went and was astonished to learn how many of them had been destroyed in recent years. The daughters of today were guilty of pushing them aside in favor of the new, just as I had done one day.

It is true that many of our mothers were still using the old favorite recipes, but were doing so by memory. When I found them, the little notebooks were usually at the bottom of a stack of modern cookbooks and were kept only for memorys sake. Through the years many had become so worn and soiled that in places they were no longer legible. By now these old books with their recipes had become like cherished pieces of old china, each telling a story of the days when Grandmother was queen of the kitchen. Two factors were responsible for my desire to collect these old recipes and have them published. The first was the realization that in many instances our mothers would be the last generation to use them.

The second was the realization, on my own part, of how much I had learned to appreciate many of these fine old recipes. I was challenged with the thought that now is the time to preserve them. So this book is an attempt to preserve for posterity our own peculiar type of cookery that has been handed down for many generations. In order to make this book more inclusive than it would be if only Grandmothers recipes were recorded, it also includes favorite recipes of our own day. Grandmother recorded no salad recipes or casserole dishes or numerous other dishes that our present appetites call for. Many of the old recipes came in a form that would not be much help to the modern homemaker.

In order to make each recipe usable today, all these have been tested, and ingredients have been measured by standard measuring equipment. Details for procedure in carrying out the recipe have also been added. Most of the stories recorded in chapter introductions came from my grandmother, known to everyone outside the family as Aunt Mary. At ninety years of age, she still entertained us with these stories from the good old days. This collection is a compilation of over 1,100 recipes, chosen from more than 5,000 recipes sent in.