Cross Creek Cookery

Widely known for her best-selling novel The Yearling, winner of the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, DC. At age 32, having come into some money, she bought a tract of land in the scrub country of north-central Florida, settling in a place called Cross Creek, named for a small river that ran nearby. 

Already an accomplished novelist, she began writing about the region, which she came to love, and following her autobiographical Cross Creek, she turned to cooking, a particular passion. Drawing on her dealings with local people who fished and hunted in the hammocks of this watery region, she collected recipes and developed a number of her own, based on local ingredients.

The resulting book, half-memoir, is wonderful reading, with a great cast of characters and abundant recipes that one nearly aches to try: sour cream muffins, fried cheese grits, Ruth Becker’s Creole oyster soup, buttered crabs, Spanish chicken fricassée, macaroon cream, kumquat jelly. And a few that, for many “outsiders,” might perhaps be more appealing to read about than to cook and eat: alligator tail steaks, coot liver and gizzard pilau, jellied tongue, swamp cabbage salad. 

A delightful trip down a culinary side-road by a major writer, and a very nice addition to any collection.

Paperback.