An Old-Fashioned, Midwestern Love Song

Like a manual for the good life, harking back to days gone by, The Country Kitchen Cook Book by Edward Harris Heth takes you on a seasonal romp through 1950’s Midwest bringing along a basket of fresh fruit, a warm greeting and a cast of characters you’ll feel like you’ve known your whole life.

This vintage cookbook is such a gem that I find myself reaching for it whenever the first robins begin singing in the spring to the days when the great outdoors looks like a giant snow globe and the only reason I have to move about is to make hot chocolate.

The Country Kitchen Cook Book is the tastes, flavors and dishes of a city man who returned to the country. With the popularity of food memoirs on the rise, Edward Harris Heth is one of the originals - born and raised in southern Wisconsin, he went on to live in New York only to return home to make roots in the country life he was missing.

Heth has captured what it is to be a Midwesterner and to take full advantage of the seasons. Through the books four parts – The Green Spring, The Ripening Summer, The Autumn Calm and The Winter Reward – he brings you back to cool spring nights on the deck and hot, bright days by the lake. With a sing-song rhythm, the reader becomes in-tune with the changing seasons and Heth’s recipes bring the freshest of flavors to the tip of your tongue. An author of short stories and plays, Heth was probably the original ‘locavore’ – then again, so were all of his neighbors.

Written in 1956, the book's last chapter, A Country Kitchen, shares with us what drew Heth back to the Midwest – memories of his mom . . . “I like to remember my mother’s respect for the kitchen: it was kind of a holy place from which she ministered lavishly to her family via stove and sink and cupboards and flour bin. There were rag rugs on the floor; usually wild white daisies or goldenrod stuck in a milk bottle . . . Good cooking was a way of life and enjoyment. You did not save time but spent it recklessly, proudly, and with full reward inside these four spotless walls.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.


-GE, 5/7/08