The Bluestem Kitchen

A Word from the Keeper of the Books

The recipes in this book were never kept in one place. That is the first thing to know about them.

Some were written down. My great great grandmother Sarah kept her receipts in the back of the horse ledger, after the sale figures, in pencil, in a hand so plain you could have read it by lantern light across a room. My great grandmother Annie wrote hers on the inside covers of whatever was handy. My grandmother Birdie kept the best of hers on the jar labels, because the jars were what she sold, and a woman who is selling gooseberry preserves in Dodge City had better know exactly what went into them. My mother kept nothing on paper that was not also a number. Her pot roast was in her hands.

The rest were never written at all. They were carried. Somebody stood at a stove and somebody younger stood beside her and watched, and that was the whole of the method for a hundred years.

I started gathering them in the winter of 1986, the year my mother was ill and the farm and I had a long quiet season together. I had time and a good lamp and the family's ledgers on the office shelf, back to 1934, and before that, loose pages and inside covers and the labels off jars that my grandmother had soaked free and saved in a cigar box. I went through all of it. When a recipe had a blank in it, a missing measure or a line that said only "enough flour," I asked whoever was still living to show me, and I stood beside them and watched, the way it was always done, and then I wrote down what their hands did.

I have set the recipes down by kitchen, one woman at a time, from Sarah in 1891 to my own. I have let each of them tell you about her food in her own words where I had her words, and in words as close to hers as I could make them where I did not. Where my mother has left a note in the margin, in pencil, in capital letters, I have kept it. You will know it when you see it.

At the back is the cellar shelf. Every jar this family ever put up is there, all together, because that is how they sat in the cellar, and because canning is the one part of a kitchen where you do not get to guess. Read that chapter through before you start.

The count in this book is honest. Every recipe has been made in a real kitchen, with real flour, by somebody who meant to eat it. That is the only standard this family ever held a recipe to, and it is the one I have held these to.

Leave the light on.

Erica Weber, Willow Creek, Kansas