Filed under: Hors D'oeuvres, Recipes, Food Oddities, America, Comfort Food, Retro cookery Recently, as I was dipping through a copy of my family cookbook in search of one of my mother's favorite recipes, I took a good, long look at the book itself. In addition to being a nice resource, it is also so...

Pearl [Price] Shepherd circa 1900 in Price’s Fork, Virginia. Remember that little girl in last week’s post?  Here she is all grown up.  Ain’t she purty? In 1899, Pearl Price married Zack Shepherd, who we’ll meet next week, and they had three daughters: Willie Mae, Ethel (my great g...

The Price family in the 1880s.  From left to right: Mary “Pearlâ€� Price, John Preston Price, Eliza Ellen [Cook] Price, and Lilly Catherine Price.  Photograph from Sandra [Hunt] Alger. Is that a cool picture or what?  I’m not sure I would have believed that the 1800s actually exis...

                    This is my grandmother, Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe, at my wedding in 2000.  She hates this picture because she thinks it makes her look old.  But, I love it because this is mostly how I’ve always known her....

Have you ever been in the process of saying goodbye to a bunch of people, but somebody keeps missing the cues?  You’ll be all, “Okay, so, I’ll see you later,â€� and then someone asks a question that launches a whole new conversation, so then you have to start again from the top, with a fe...

What day is today?  Crap.  Let’s make this quick. If these cookies look familiar to you, it’s because they’ve already been around the blogosphere here, here, and here.  They go by many names, including seven-layer cookies, Hello Dolly bars, and magic bars, but whatever you call ...