Personal Recipes and Cowboy Chow from the La Leche League

Community cookbooks. You know I love them. They tell the story of a community and their food. But in some cases the community cookbook is not documenting an actual community location (like a local church or school) but instead a community of like-minded individuals that may have never met in person. This community could be organized around membership in a common group.

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

An example of this is the 1970s cookbook, Mother's in the Kitchen. The LLL Cookbook. This "community" cookbook documents members of La Leche League from all over the United States and Canada. This is one of those times that you wish the index was a surname index and not just an alphabetical list of recipes.

So these are recipes by moms for moms. The About section explains that

The purpose of our Mother's in the Kitchen is to help mothers plan nourishing meals for their families using the best of the products available on the market today.

It's obvious that this cookbook was in response to  cookbook recipes  with casseroles filled with canned products, frozen food dinners, and quickly bought and consumed hamburgers and fries. This cookbook's goal was to get families away from "highly refined and processed foods." In fact,

Thus we have deliberately eliminated recipes which call for prepared mixes and packaged foods.

This community cookbook is also different because the recipes were tested multiple times by people who did not contribute the recipe. It's not unusual to see a community cookbook, especially older ones, talk about the quality of their recipes but this is one of the few to actually go through a testing process.

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

There's a lot of great genealogical content in this cookbook including the city and state (or country) the contributor is from, her given name, her husband's first name, and in some cases mentions of family. Obviously, we also know they were at one time a member of La Leche League as well. And best of all, those involved in the cookbooks creation, the typists and the recipe testers (3 1/2 pages of them) are also listed.

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

In some cases this cookbook includes recipes created by the contributor and not handed down or procured from a cookbook. Such is the case in this ground beef recipe called Cowboy Chow which reminds me of  Goulash minus the pasta (or whatever your family's name for a recipe that includes macaroni, ground beef, and tomato sauce. People have often remarked that it also includes leftovers which is what the following recipe also includes).

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

The contributor, Edwina Froehlich comments:

This is basically a Spanish rice recipe, named Cowboy Chow to entice our boys who  (like many small children) didn't like "mixed-up food" (casseroles). The name has stuck, even though in my own mind this is a clean-up-the-icebox-dish--perfect for Thursday's evening meal before Friday's weekly shopping. 

So we get a nice history of her recipe, her husband's name, her city/state, and the fact that she has at least 2 sons.

And what's not to like about this dish? After all, it does have bacon!

Have you written out the recipes that were your family's unique creation? One of the great things about this recipe is the added personal detail.