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Company
At The Parsonage |
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cookbook
reviews company at the parsonage |
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Company at the Parsonage
by Mary M. Scott
Price From Amazon.com: $14.95
Reviewed by Andrew Watson
Click
Here to Buy It On Line!
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Review |
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January
2003
When a young reader asks if he can write a review on his grandmother's
cookbook, how could we say no?
Some years ago my maternal grandmother, Mary Mackenzie Scott,
published a cookbook. The title is Company at the Parsonage
and book's cover contains a sketch of the Parsonage, a charming
Victorian house, white, square, fronted with one of those whole-family
porches and sided with a bay window.
Mary M. Scott is the wife to the Reverend Allen Scott, and together
they served the Flanders Baptist and Community Church of East
Lyme, Connecticut for 37 years. The church is in an old-fashioned
one-room-chapel and is a short walk down the road from the Parsonage.
Her cookbook grew out of diaries that my grandmother had kept
most of her married life, but also includes some memories from
her childhood in next-door Waterford, CT. She was raised along
with her sister and brother on a dairy farm, the daughter of
a migrated Scotsman and the former schoolmistress he seduced
away from public education. According to my grandmother, her
grandfather, Mr. Mackenzie ran down to the barn at three a.m.
to milk the cows, generally bouncing a soccer ball on his head
as he went. The book relaxedly (as opposed to rigidly following
a format) moves from summer to summer, and the recipes (as well
as a few craft-ideas and general hints) along with the accompanying
anecdotes, reconstruct bits and pieces from a whole life into
a year long tale of holidays, church groups and church and private
dinners and the people who gave life to these occasions.
The forty-or-so chapters tend to follow a general pattern. A
short paragraph to a page introduces the topic with relative
memories from her life and sometimes a little general historical
or culinary information. Then comes the recipes and little blurbs
about how she got the recipe or who liked it, etc. For example,
early in the book comes the segment on Blueberries. On the opposite
side is a drawing of blueberries in a pint (my Uncle Mac, who
drew a perfect apple at age 3 did all the illustrations), and
under the heading of "Blueberries" the authoress describes how
they used to go blueberry picking when she was a girl with sunbonnets
and straw hats and Crisco cans with a cord run through them.
Then come recipes for Blueberry pie, Blueberry Slump, and Andrew's
Favorite Blueberry Muffins. I am the only grandkid to have a
recipe named for him - but I'm the oldest, so that's the sort
of thing that happens. There are a few words about "when Margaret
and the children came to visit…" but except in this unexplained
recipe title, the names of grandchildren are generally omitted,
as the main emphasis is on earlier times and people. Other Chapters
are about "Soups and Chowders", "Rummage Sales", "Hattie and
Bob Cooper"(one-time members of the church), "The Priest to
dinner", that great sea "Christmas," has a lot of subsidiary
chapters under it, and "The Clergy is Coming… The Clergy is
Coming" has three.
There are a few hundred recipes in this book, of everything
from what they generally ate to what they served at church sales
to what she made for some theme nights (they had a few of these
at the Parsonage over the years - a 'Victorian night' once,
and a 'night in Italy' and etc.). The food is mostly standard
New England fare, generally boiled, not spicy. East Lyme lays
next to the ocean and so the fried flounder and clam chowder
recipes have a little bit of added authority and I mention them
to show how the recipes are a dynamic part of the book's narrative,
flushing out a picture of this town and the life that went with
it. Using and/or reading Company at the Parsonage transports
one to a magical (yet real) world, where people are always giving
and receiving little gifts (typically of food), helping each
other and the community and participating in wholesome dinners
and church sales, a fairy land where you don't drink or gamble
or swear but you don't put down those who do either. The cookbook
is a cookbook, a history, and also a wholesome perspective on
life. Wholesomeness is hard to pull off, it is tempting to drift
into indulging some kind of smugness, and it is in having done
a pretty good job of avoiding smugness that my grandmother's
particular genius lays - her positive, honest perspective is
captured by the book.
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