According to the old saw, some people eat to live, meaning they aren’t particular about what they eat or how it is prepared. Well, I think it is fair to say my family “lived to eat.” We enjoyed food!! It may not have been prepared in a fancy way, but it was fixed with love. Don’t ask me why but the folks said “fixed” instead of “prepared” as in “I’ll have supper fixed directly.” Mom, Grandmother Hightower and other members of the family prided themselves on being good cooks and well they should. Light rolls were high and light. Fried catfish was crisp on the outside and moist on the inside. Steak was tender enough to cut with a fork. And who could stop with just one piece of red devil’s food cake with fudge icing?


It may seem strange to write about a cookbook but Mom’s Rumford Cookbook was no ordinary cookbook. It served as the almanac in which the first snow of the year or some unusual weather was recorded. It was a family history with a listing of family members’ birth dates. And it was the diary in which family members wrote memories. I wrote in it about bringing Pegg home in January 1950 while Lois wrote about being with the folks at a Christmas, telling what Mom was cooking and how good the fudge was. Oh yes, it was also a recipe book in which Mom put her favorite recipes…The Depression was very deep during the thirties but as we had the grocery store, we never worried about having enough food. I said one time that I wasn’t fussy about what I ate so I always ate what Mom put on the table. What I didn’t add was her belief that food should be enjoyed so she fixed what we liked to eat just the way we liked it…


Our week day breakfast was usually grapefruit or cantaloupe (whichever was in seson) toast, bacon, hot or cold cereal and coffee. I started drinking coffee when I was about four years old and about all the milk I got was on cereal. We ate a lot of oatmeal in winter and cold cereal in summer. I can still hear the sound of Dad crushing Post Toasties with his hands after pouring some into the bowl. Sometimes Mom fixed waffles or pancakes – we called them hotcakes. And she always heated the syrup for them. We seldom ate eggs but when we did, we either fried them or made scrambled egg sandwiches. I liked to take scrabled egg sandwiches in my lunch at school. One of my favorite sandwiches in summer was a bacon and tomato sandwich. Mom made mush out of corn mean and hot water. Sometimes we ate it right then and other times Mom left it to set overnight to congeal. The next morning, she sliced it very thin and fried it in bacon drippings until it was crisp. Some people called it “poor man’s bacon.” I called it good!”


Guess what I used to take to school in my lunch box too! Yep. Scrambled egg sandwiches with a little mayo and lettuce. Can’t believe we didn’t die of salmonella!!


Reading through the tattered Rumford Cookbook, I found three recipes for devil’s food cake in Grandmother’s writing and one of them was for the Red Devil’s Food cake that my dad mentions. However, there was another recipe that looked so curious, I had to make it to see how in the world it would turn out. This cake includes mashed potatoes!! And Grandmother had a bad habit of just writing down ingredients with no instructions, so I just did what I thought would work. It is a curious cake indeed and it looks like something straight out of Little House of the Prairie! I have to remember that cakes baked in the “old days” were much heavier and denser than our packaged cakes of today and this particular one is too. But it has a good flavor and Mr. Fix-It tried it topped with fresh strawberries. He said it was like eating chocolate covered strawberries! So here you go…potatoes and cocoa all together in one confection from the 1930’s!