Alabama: From Axes to Wheatgerm

Ready for a trip down south?

I was not entirely sure how ready I was for Twickenham Receipts and Sketches (The Twickenham Historical Preservation District Association, Inc., Huntsville, AL, 1978). I like the old-fashioned use of receipt for recipe, but sketches? I imagined a whole book filled with fantasies of mammy doing the cooking and a jet-black butler ferrying her creations out to the waiting white family.

The picture on the cover is representative of the actual sketches in the book, though. They're almost all drawings of old houses.

The collection has a few historical recipes, and while they're based on a nostalgia for the past, it's not exactly the type of nostalgia I was expecting.

The recipe for Beaten Biscuits is nostalgic for a time when cooks had to spend the first half hour after they woke up beating biscuit dough with an axe(!) on a biscuit block.

I'm pretty sure the late "Miss Kate" Halsey was not the one making beaten biscuits, based on her lament of the "Soda and modern institutions" that have made the biscuits such a rarity. No matter how great beaten biscuits may have been, I'm pretty sure the cooks much preferred doing something else with that half-hour in the morning.

Most of the recipes were modern, though. I found a casserole recipe that seemed to want to kitchen-sink every major '70s casserole ingredient, regardless of whether it belonged.

Ground chuck? Check. American cheese? Check! Onion? Check! Canned Chinese noodles? Egg noodles? Check! Cashews? Check! Stuffed olives? Check! Cream of mushroom soup? Check! All it's missing is a can of pineapple or fruit cocktail....

I also loved this dessert recipe that gets half-heartedly (or maybe only quarter-heartedly!) into the '70s health food craze.

Know how to make Reeses Peanut Butter Squares healthy? All it takes for that stick-and-a-half of butter and box of powdered sugar mixed with graham cracker crumbs and peanut butter to be wholesome is a "sprinkle [of] wheatgerm on top"! (Not sure if it's permitted on top of the layer of extra butter with chocolate chips, but let's just assume that it is.)

If nothing else, I learned that making healthy desserts is way easier than most people suspect. Plus, if your efforts to eat healthier somehow lead to weight gain, you can always work off those extra calories with some biscuit dough and an axe.