Greenup County
My life sometimes seems like a never-ending war with paper. Sometimes it seems like a never-ending war with dust. Today I declared truce on both. The truce is over, however, because I want to put another of my cookbooks away and I can’t put it away until I’ve blogged about it. Such little rituals we choose as frames for our lives.
Today’s community cookbook was published in 1988 by the Greenup County Extension Homemakers as the Anniversary Cookbook. It’s a lovely example of a standard cookbook that has been extended and personalized by a particular group, in this case the Greenup County Extension Homemakers Association (their punctuation, by the way) in Greenup Kentucky. I would so love to know the origins of the name ‘Greenup’ for a place. It fits the rich green that I encountered in my one visit to Kentucky. The grass was green enough to belong somewhere fictional.
Anyhow (and sorry for the digressions – I watched Eurovision tonight and my brain thinks in flashy images rather than linear thoughts, such is the power of Eurovision) the pro forma book that was the basis was from Kansas and the owners of it call themselves “World’s Largest Publisher of Personalized Cook Books.” It’s very much a descendant of the fundraising cookbooks of the 1950s.
These fundraising cookbooks are a very important part of local food history. They provide a consistent method of sharing food knowledge in a community. From a research point of view, the variants in them where a community has modified a standard product, such as the Greenup version, can give us valuable insights into a community and allow us insights into its distinctiveness. So many writers use phrases like “All small towns are the same,” but even slight differences can be crucial in understanding their history.
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