1984
Author: Diana Dalsass
Contributors: Helen Daniel, Louise Gregory, Barbara Ruth McGowen, Leola Dismukes
Mrs. Mary’s Down-Home Cooking: Traditional Recipes from Lynchburg, Tennessee, written in 1984 by Diana Dalsass, describes the various recipes from Mrs. Mary’s Boarding House, Bobo House, in Lynchburg, Tennessee. To create this book, Dalsass interviewed various members of the Lynchburg community, including the cooks still at the Bobo house —Helen Daniel, Louise Gregory, Barbara Ruth McGowen, and Leola Dismukes — who had access to Mrs. Mary’s original recipes from the early to mid- 20th century. Mrs. Mary, or Mrs. Mary Bobo, opened the Bobo Boarding House in 1908 with her husband. They housed many people in the boarding house, and it was a hub for Lynchburg social life due to its close proximity to the town square. Because Mrs. Mary passed away only a couple of years before this book was published, Dalsass’s efforts to record her recipes may be to preserve her memory and contributions to Lynchburg after her passing. Mrs. Mary’s dedication to the boarding house and its residents shined through in her regular schedule for cooking breakfast at dawn, working with the cook at nine o’clock, eating with the visitors for lunch at noon, and preparing supper at night. Because preparing meals was integral to Mrs. Mary’s boarding house, this book includes a variety of recipes organized by “Meats, Poultry, & Fish,” “Vegetables, Salads, & Side Dishes,” “Breads & Rolls,” “Pies & Other Desserts,” “Tennessee Bar-B-Que,” and “Holiday Foods”. Dalsass also provides a standard daily menu at the boarding house for readers to understand how these recipes functioned together. This cookbook is intriguing in how it combines Mrs. Mary and her cooks’ recipes with their significance to the broader social lives of Lynchburg residents. Dalsass combines these recipes with late nineteenth-century diary entries by a local woman Sue Dance Record to provide context into the community and time period that Mrs. Mary’s boarding house existed in. The maps of the boarding house in relation to other major sites in Lynchburg at the beginning and end of the cookbook (as seen below) also stress the significance of local community in the story of Mrs. Mary’s recipes.
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