You think you are going to a book club meeting in a coffeehouse just to hear about the meaning of good Kentucky food.
Then you learn that someone has made a blackberry cobbler from a recipe in the chosen book. And there’s vanilla ice cream, too, if you like.
Suddenly your random Saturday in the middle of a very hot July becomes delicious.
That’s how my Saturday went at The Corner Coffeehouse, where owners April and Amanda Huff-McClure hosted the book club for a Kentucky Humanities-sponsored discussion of “Savory Memories: Kentucky Foodways” led by Constance Alexander. A Murray-based poet, playwright and nonfiction writer, Constance is a Hoptown Chronicle board member who has led several book discussions and poetry workshops in Hopkinsville over the last five years.
“Savory Memories,” published in 1998 by The University Press of Kentucky, is a collection of essays written by Kentuckians reflecting mostly on the food of their families.
The book touches on many topics — gardens, smokehouses, farms, fried chicken, lard, church suppers, grandmothers, aunts, impatient children, old ways and memory. Sprinkled among the personal stories are recipes for food such as jam cake, yeast rolls, fig ice cream, corn muffins, watermelon pickles, pound cake, snow cream, potato dumplings and plum pudding with hard sauce. There are two versions of blackberry cobbler — one from late John Edgerton, a Trigg County native who wrote wisely about Southern people and food, and the other from Shirley Williams, an Eastern Kentucky native who wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal for 33 years.
Constance started the book discussion by asking everyone present to name something from the kitchen that brought to mind their families.
These came easily. Cast iron skillets, a paring knife, grandmother’s cookbook, a silver straw for iced tea, a container of bacon grease on the stove, cake pans, a rolling pin — and my favorite, the bathtub where frozen bags of chitterlings were thawed during the holidays
Later we got to the blackberry cobbler, which Amanda made for us.
Cobbler, more than most sweets, should be a summer dessert. I know that the year-round availability of fruit in grocery stores has sort of flattened out some of our seasonal patterns — but cobbler just belongs to July. My tastebuds said so at the coffeehouse.
Constance left us with one last thought from the book. This from “Savory Memories” essay writer Diane Aprile, a former journalist who teaches creative nonfiction students at Spalding University in Louisville:
“I see the foods of my childhood in big stubborn pots clattering on the tops of stoves.”
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Here’s a cobbler recipe from Shirley Williams in “Savory Memories.”
Aunt Edna’s Blackberry Cobbler
1 cup water
1 quart blackberries
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
7 heaping tablespoons self-rising flour
1 cup milk
1/2 cup shortening
Combine water, blackberries and sugar in a saucepan and cook until mixture boils. Set aside.
Place berries in a rectangular baking pan and heat on stove. Mix cornstarch and 1 cup water with a whisk, then pour into berries. Stir.
Mix flour, milk and shortening. Roll out and cut into strips. Cover berries wi
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
