Pound Cake and Church Bells

Inside a box of old cookbooks, a writer finds a connection to history she didn’t know existed

- Cat Carter

THE OLIVE COVER of The Sandlapper Cookbook screams 1970s. I find it toward the bottom of an overstuffed file box that Chef Bruce Moffett lets me rummage through one evening before his restaurant, Stagioni, opens for dinner. It is like my own personal yard sale—a yard sale in which everything is a Southern cookbook and everything is free.

There are three other boxes just like the first, gifted to Moffett by his neighbor, each holding treasures such as Charleston Bowlers Favorite Recipes and Furniture City Feasts from the Junior League of High Point, North Carolina. The cookbooks reach back as far as the ’60s, some of them hardbound and printed in full color, others with tattered paper covers and plastic comb bindings. Many were printed as fundraisers for a community or an organization.

As we flip through the books, themes emerge. The ’70s have much love for beef strogan off and chicken tetrazzini. Curry shows up strong in the ’80s, even finding its way into fruit and dessert dishes. Southern cooks in every decade like a good pound cake. The number of culinary applications for a box of Jell-O is absolutely astonishing.

The Sandlapper Cookbook reads like many of the others: uncomplicated recipes, sometimes with a brief introduction, often with the name and town of the person who submitted the recipe. It was printed in 1973 by the Sandlapper Publishing Company, a small publisher specializing in books on South Carolina. On page 85, I find a four ingredient recipe for country-style steak that leads with a single sentence: “This recipe has been a traditional ‘family night supper’ favorite at Fishing Creek Presbyterian Church in Chester County since 1752.”