State fare: New publication features recipes gleaned from popular

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 15, 2004 by Valerie Phillips Deseret Morning News

Those who think that Utah cuisine consists mainly of Jell-O salads and Funeral Potatoes should check out the "Best of the Best From Utah Cookbook," compiled by Gwen McKee and Barbara Moseley, both of Mississippi. Sure, those perennial favorites are there, but so are recipes as varied as Dutch Oven Pot Roast, Grilled Chicken Teriyaki, Ultimate Jambalaya, Chile Relleno Eggs, Penne alla Siciliana, and Deer Valley's Chocolate Snowball. They all came from popular Utah cookbooks.

"It's a good sample of a lot of different foods from all over the state," said McKee, who was visiting Utah last week to promote the book.

More than 20 years ago, she and Moseley set out to find the "best" recipes from different cookbooks and compile them into one book, on a state-by-state basis. They started with Mississippi and continued with Gwen's native state of Louisiana in 1984. Over the years, they made a book on every state in the Union, with Utah and Nevada the last in the series. The Utah book was just published, and the Nevada book is now being printed, McKee said. (They're available for $16.96 from Quail Ridge Press, 1-800-343-1583, or www.quailridge.com.)

Why was Utah at the end of the list? "We had no rhyme or reason for that, it just happened that way," said McKee, who regularly skied in Park City with her family long before doing the cookbook.

Putting together Utah's book was easier than their early projects, when they drove into rural communities to scout for local cookbooks. "There was no Internet. The only way you could find these books was to go and stop at a little drugstore and find out that the ladies had put together a cookbook for their chamber of commerce."

And they learned it's true: You should never judge a book by its cover. Some of the most modest-looking books had the best recipes, McKee said.

"But some of them weren't written perfectly, and we wanted them so that anybody could follow them," she said. "So we were the editors. If the recipe calls for moose, we tell you if you can substitute deer or beef, so no matter where you are, if you can get to a supermarket, you can cook it." (Well, OK, except for those seal blubber recipes in the Alaska cookbook that they included for novelty's sake.)

Over the years they traveled more than 110,000 miles, evaluated over 10,000 cookbooks, and selected 17,214 recipes for their series.

To do the Utah book, they consulted 66 local cookbooks, asking the authors to submit 10-12 of their favorite recipes from their respective books. They tested some of them, but not all -- "After doing thousands and thousands of recipes, a lot of times you can look at them and know if they are going to work," McKee said. In the back of the book is a catalog of all the books that were used, including "Always In Season," "All That Jam," "Aromatherapy in the Kitchen," "Backyard Dutch Oven," "A Century of Mormon Cookery," "Chocolate Snowball," "The Cowboy Chuck Wagon Cookbook," "Dude Food," "Favorite Utah Pioneer Recipes," "How to Enjoy Zucchini," "Lion House Recipes," "Junior League of Ogden Art of Cooking," "No Green Gelatin Here!" "A Pinch of Salt Lake Cookbook," "Recipes for Roughing It Easy," "Savor the Memories," "World Championship Dutch Oven Cookbook" and "Utah Cookbook."

McKee and Moseley picked up on some "uniquely Utah" tendencies such as outdoor Dutch oven cooking and the use of wild fish and game. They also found that Utah defines "scones" differently from the rest of the world -- "They're fried!" exclaimed McKee.

One of McKee's personal favorites is the Bacon-Shrimp Potato Salad with Cayenne Pecans, from "Five Star Recipes From Well-Known Latter- day Saints." "It's an unusual combination that's so well-done. And we love the soups up here, like this Spicy Southwestern Chowder (from '30 Days to a Healthier Family'). Utah has a lot of Southwestern flavors."

The book is sprinkled with snippets of information about Utah -- that the sego lily became the state flower because early settlers survived on their bulbous roots when food was scarce. And that Utah elected the first woman to the U.S. Senate in 1896 and had the first department store, ZCMI. And that more than 600 films and TV movies have been made in Utah, which is also the second largest state for tart cherry production and fifth largest for sweet cherries. There's also no escaping the dubious honor of consuming more Jell-O per capita than any other state. Other claims to fame mentioned are Butch Cassidy, Temple Square, the 2002 Winter Games, and various national parks and monuments.

Their "Best of the Best" books differ from trendy celebrity chef cookbooks. "They have a lot of good things in them, but they're fancy, and they often use measurements in ounces, not cups," said McKee. "The recipes in our books, while some may be fancy, are home cooking. Also, people want easy recipes. If you start a recipe with a cake mix, they are more apt to try it than a cake made from scratch. "

They've found recipes that crisscross the whole country, under different names. What Utahns call Funeral Potatoes are known as Company Potatoes in McKee's neck of the woods. Chicken breasts sauced with Russian salad dressing, apricot jam and Lipton onion soup mix go by Amazing Apricot Chicken, Sweet & Sour Chicken and Door Slammer Chicken in different cookbooks in the series.