Cookbooks can evoke the past with a particular keenness, not merely to the foods of memory, to a living past. The more I go over this book–as I have, so many times–the more my memory awakens to the idyllic little world that was my childhood in Bruce, Mississippi. In the the pages of this cookbook, I find again the people and businesses that brought to noise and motion to the Square, Newburger, and Center Streets, and the homes and stores along out-of-the-way two-lane highways that pass through town. I knew the women who donated these recipes, knew their husbands, and their children were my schoolmates. Some I still know.
