The Country Kitchen (Great Lakes Books)

Della Lutes was born in 1872 and lived on a farm near Jackson, Michigan until she was sixteen, when she left home to teach school. She eventually became the editor of "American Motherhood," "Today's Housewife," and in 1923 the "Modern Priscilla" magazine. When the publishing firm she worked for went bankrupt during the Great Depression, Della became a freelance writer and produced "The Country Kitchen," which started out as a series of articles in "The Atlantic Monthly." Her book was named "The Most Original Book" of 1936 by the American Booksellers Association and was described by Christopher Morley as a 'gastronomical autobiography.'

I don't know whether I'll ever try the recipe for "salt-risin' bread" or buy a quarter of beef to be "nicely ripened by hanging a couple of weeks or so in the woodshed," but I'll long remember the story of how Della's father entertained the Ladies' Church Aid Society by turning a baby skunk loose during their annual dinner. And then there's the story of Little Runt, who was fated to be the Thanksgiving pig, and Old Wart, the garden toad. Della's story wheels you through the complete cycle of seasons with all of the sights and smells of rural Michigan (you might not want to know what some folks used for home insulation, come late Autumn).

This author deserves a place on your shelf right next to Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has saturated this book with the tastes and smells of a late nineteenth-century rural kitchen, bringing back recollections I never knew I had. Maybe it's got something to do with ancestral remembrance, since nearly all of our folks were rural up until the early decades of the last century.

All I can urge you to do is read it and remember.


Michigan's answer to MFK Fisher   January 8, 2001
 14 out of 14 found this review helpful

Mildly intrigued by the title of this book, I bought a used copy...a flea market in Lunenberg, Mass. this past fall. It turned out to be a real gem. Superbly well-written, it weaves together accounts of the author's family life in rural Michigan at the turn of the Twentieth Century with recipes of the food the family ate. The effect is very much along the lines of MFK Fisher's books about her life in France. But unlike Mrs. Fisher, Ms. Lutes is no self-conscious bohemian. Very much a woman of her time and place, she is nonetheless independent, intelligent, and very funny. That is, there is nothing genteel and Victorian about her, and nothing pretentious. She is modern, one of us. Who was Della T. Lutes? Hard to tell at this late date. My 1965 edition of "The Reader's Encyclopedia" has no entry on her. Amazon.com has only this title for sale. But she must have had a considerable following in her day. My copy of "The Country Kitchen," printed in 1948, was apparently the 22nd printing of a book originally published in 1936. The flyleaf lists four other titles by her. I gave "The Country Kitchen" to my wife, a chef, for Christmas. She has yet to stop raving about it. More than a cook book, a culinary history or a social history, "The Country Kitchen" qualifies as capital-L Literature.