300 recipes · 493 pages · large print throughout · instant download

Pigeon Roost Holler · Knott County, Kentucky

Nobody was teaching it any more.

So I wrote the whole of it down — 300 recipes, and everything that goes around them.

My mama was ten years old the autumn the banks went down, and she learned to cook in a house where the money simply stopped. I learned it at her elbow in the 1950s, standing on a chair with a bowl in my arms. She never taught it to me as hardship. She taught it as a skill, the way you teach somebody to drive.

300recipes

493pages

28chapters

Largeprint throughout

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Who is doing the writing-down

I am eighty-one, and I am the last one on this creek who still cooks this way.

My name is June Caudill Slone. I was born in the spring of 1945 in Pigeon Roost Holler, the fourth of seven. My daddy dug coal at a truck mine up the creek and came home black to the wrist, whistling hymns. My mama could feed nine people out of a garden, a hog and a cellar, and never once let on that it was difficult.

I married Harlan in 1964 and I cook for one now, in the little house he built. My grandchildren are grown and gone and they never learned a bit of it — not the biscuit dough, not the pantry, not what to do when the gravy breaks.

So I sat down and put all of it on paper, on purpose, before it goes with me. Not the hardship. Mama would think you had lost your mind. Just the knowing.

— Mamaw JuneJune Caudill Slone, born 1945

What is in it

Five parts. Twenty-eight chapters. You can start anywhere.

Half of it is recipes. The other half is everything a cookbook usually leaves out — the knowing that used to be handed over a kitchen table and is not being handed over any more.

Part One

Mama's Ways

How a kitchen is actually run, before a single recipe.

The seven rules a good kitchen turns on
Cast iron: seasoning, rescuing, keeping it
Stretching — how one chicken fed seven
When it goes wrong: curdled, split, lumpy, scorched
Cooking for one or two, written warm

Part Two

The Recipes — all 300

Eleven chapters, each one on a page of its own.

Biscuits, cornbread and the morning food
Soup beans, soups and stews
One-pot suppers and stretchers
From the garden · When there was meat
Depression cakes — no eggs, no butter, no milk
Pies from nothing · Cookies and little treats
Canning and putting up, by tested methods
Homemade mixes · Holidays and Sunday dinners

Part Three

The Pantry

A shelf that means you never cook from an empty kitchen.

The thirty foods that keep for years
The year in food — what is good in which month
How long everything really keeps
Storing it right
Building a pantry in twelve weeks

Part Four

Nothing Wasted

The part my mama would have called plain good sense.

Forty scraps you should never throw away
Stale bread, sour milk, bacon grease and bones
Leftovers made into something else
Vegetables you can grow again on a windowsill

Part Five

The Plan

Where it stops being reading and starts being supper.

Four weeks of suppers, written out
Lists and checklists to print
The monthly kitchen sheet

And at the back

Measures & the Index

The pages you fold a corner on.

Measures, conversions, pan swaps
Ovens, altitude and why yours lies to you
All 300 recipes alphabetically — and dishes that go by two names listed under both

Look inside

Real pages out of the book.

A recipe page close up, showing the type size

Three things I decided on purpose

Because I am eighty-one and I know what a cookbook gets wrong.

It is set in large print

All of it, not a separate edition — the recipes, the tables, the lot. And it is printed on white, so when you run a page off for the kitchen counter it costs you almost nothing in ink.

Metric in brackets, on every recipe

Grams, millilitres, centimetres and degrees Celsius, right beside the cups and the Fahrenheit. You do not convert a thing, wherever in the world you are cooking.

It is meant to be written in

Mama had one cookbook, a church one with a ring binder, and she had written in the margin of nearly every page. That is what a cookbook is for. Write in this one.

One thing it is not

This is not a book about going without.

There is a lot of nonsense talked about the old ways — bunkers and hard times and getting by on nothing. That is not what this is, and my mama would think you had lost your mind.

Everything that made her kitchen hard has been taken away from us. We have taps and thermostats and refrigerators, and we got all those hours back for nothing. What got left behind in the bargain was the knowing — how to stretch a chicken, keep a pantry, save a broken gravy, put up a summer. That is all this book is trying to give back. It tastes better, it keeps longer, and you know how.

What you get for $39

One book. One payment. Yours to keep.

Mamaw June's Depression Kitchen One file, one download — 493 pages, 28 chapters, five parts

493 pp

300 recipes, each on a page of its own What it serves, the pan, the oven, the time, then what you need and what to do

Large print, all the way through Not a separate edition, and printed on white so a page costs almost nothing in ink

Metric in brackets on every recipe Grams, millilitres, centimetres and Celsius beside the cups and the Fahrenheit

Seventeen chapters that are not recipes Cast iron, stretching, rescues, the pantry, the year, the storing, the leftovers

Printable lists, inventories and kitchen sheets In the back of the book — print them, or write straight in it

Every future edition, free Every receipt I set down after this one comes to the same email, for good

One payment today

$39

Get the book · $39

The download reaches your email within a minute · pay once, yours forever

Thirty days

Cook one thing out of it. If it is not what you hoped, write to me inside thirty days and every dollar comes back — no argument and no questions.

Before you buy

What folks ask first.

What exactly do I get, and how?

A digital book — one PDF — that reaches your email within a minute of paying. Read it on a phone, a tablet or a computer, print any page you like at the kitchen table, and keep it forever. Nothing to install and nothing to subscribe to.

I am not much good with computers.

If you can open an email, you can open this. We send you a link, you tap it, and the book is there. If you get stuck, write back to that email and I will walk you through it.

Is the print big enough? My eyes are not what they were.

Yes — that is the whole reason it is 493 pages. It is set large all the way through, one recipe to a page, so you are not squinting across a counter at it. Have a look at the close-up in the pictures above and judge for yourself.

I do not cook in cups and Fahrenheit.

Every recipe carries the metric alongside — grams, millilitres, centimetres and Celsius, in brackets right after the American measure. Nothing to work out.

Do I need cast iron, or a wood stove?

No. Every recipe works on a modern range, gas or electric. The iron makes some of them better, and there is a whole chapter on keeping a skillet if you have inherited one.

Is it difficult cooking?

It is the plainest cooking there is. Flour, meal, grease, milk, beans and what the garden gave. Most of these suppers are quicker than you think — biscuits are fifteen minutes from flour to table.

Can I share it with my children?

It is yours to keep and to hand down — that is the whole point of it. This cooking was always passed hand to hand.

And if it is not for me?

Write to me inside thirty days and you get every dollar back.

Not ready for the whole book?

Take the pantry list. It is free.

Eleven pages: the thirty foods that keep for years, how long each one really lasts, where to put it, and a tick-list to print and stick inside a cupboard door. It is a whole chapter of the book, and it costs you nothing.

I write once or twice a week with a receipt or something worth knowing in a kitchen. Leave whenever you like — every letter has the button at the foot of it. I do not pass your address to anybody.

Before it goes with the last of us.

Three hundred recipes and everything that goes around them — $39 once, no subscription, yours to keep and to hand on.

Get the book · $39

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