1978 (1st Edition)
Editor: Mrs. Reuben M. Berry Jr. Co-Editor: Mrs. August B. Turner *Other Contributors make up the “Cookbook Committee”
Publisher: The Rabun Gap-Nacoochee Club
“Atlanta Cooks for Rabun-Gap Nacoochee School” is a cookbook dedicated to the Rabun-Gap Nacochee School by a Cookbook Committee with a deep admiration for the school. It says that it is “Favorite Recipes of members of the Rabun-Gap Nacoochee Guild, Club, and Junior Guild,” (3). I was most interested in this cookbook because I am from Atlanta, and I also have always passed this school on the way to visit my grandparents who have lived in Highlands, North Carolina for as long as I can remember. Although I have never been inside the school, I can always picture Rabun-Gap majestically sitting on the perfectly maintained lawn as my family and I drive through North Georgia. In this way, this book has a special place in my heart. The cookbook was published in honor of the school’s 75th anniversary. The book’s outward appearance is not very professional, in that it is not bound like some of the other cookbooks are. It has a paper cover and back, and a spiral spine. This keeps the book together, but it also creates a fragility. The cookbook starts with a brief history of the school and the club to give context to the reader. The chapters of the book consist of regular appetizers, soups, meats, and desserts. However, 26 chapters of the book include some obscure sections. Example: “Cheese and Eggs”, “Game Birds”, “Vegetable Sauces”, and “Dessert Sauces”. For some of the strange categories, I could tell what the recipes would consist of simply because I am from Atlanta myself. However, I was unaware that it was possible to create a whole chapter of a cookbook on some of these things. I came to find out that within these strange categories, there were a lot of items that I was familiar with. For example, in the “Cheese and Eggs” category, it was more breakfast-like cheese dishes like “Baked Cheese Grits” (54), and “Egg Casserole” (57). In the “Game Girds” chapter, it consisted of only a few dishes such as “Wild Duck with Gravy” (91), and “Quail and Virginia Ham on Toast” (91). I realized that this category was simply showing readers how to prepare small birds that you hunt. I also noticed that in the “Seafood” chapter there was a dish called “St. Simons Island Deviled Crab” (94), which is the name of the island that my family and I always visit in Georgia. Some of the ingredients that stood out to me were that there was a lot of use of what seemed like heavy condiments and dairy products, such as margarine, half & half, and “Miracle Whip”. This is not surprising to me, simply because Southern comfort food typically makes a lot of their meals featuring a lot of these items. Although we don’t use things like margarine anymore, we do use a lot of foods that serve as a butter substitute like margarine. On the very last page of the cookbook, it is divided into three sections where readers can fill out one of the sections to order one of the books, and who to make the check out to. I am assuming that this slip of paper would be torn off from the page, and mailed to the address that the book gives. This gives the cookbook a very personal feel, in that you could simply pass the book along by mailing in a request for another book to an address in Atlanta.
Written By: Ellie Friedman
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