Lynn sings praises of good food

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Oct 27, 2004 by Valerie Phillips Deseret Morning News

Besides penning some of country music's most memorable lyrics, Loretta Lynn is an accomplished cook. As a 14-year-old newlywed, her home canning took 17 blue ribbons at the Northwest Washington District fair, besting veteran cooks two and three times her age.

And she had a long-running stint as a spokeswoman for Crisco, which she touted as the secret to her pie-baking success.

But that success didn't come without trial and error, as she tells in her new cookbook, "You're Cooking It Country" (Ruttledge Hill Press, $24.99). Lynn writes that at 13 she made a chocolate pie for a social that was bought by her future husband, Doolittle Lynn. Her pie- making prowess didn't impress him much because she'd used salt instead of sugar. But the couple married soon after, and for the first six months of their marriage, he threw out most of her meals.

But once she figured out what she was doing in the kitchen, "Doo loved just about everything that I fixed."

In the book, Lynn said she never set out to write a cookbook. "A year or so ago I started writing down some of my recipes handed down to me from my mommy and from Doo's mom, Angie Lynn. I wanted to give them to my kids and let them pass them down to their kids like my mommy done for me."

Along with the recipes, she included little life stories -- of watching her mommy cook on a coal stove, borrowing bottles to learn how to home-can, the eagerly anticipated banana pudding on "Decoration Day," the first time she ate roast beef, cooking her chicken 'n' dumplings against Dinah Shore's potato soup, and singer Patsy Cline's love of wild rabbit.

Her manager, Nancy Russell, got wind of Lynn's project and suggested publishing a cookbook.

You won't find a lot of gourmet cuisine in these pages. Most of the recipes are "down-home," such as coleslaw, hush puppies, fried chicken, pork chops with gravy, stuffed cabbage leaves and stewed rabbit. There's a "Hashbrown Casserole" that's better known in Utah as "Funeral Potatoes."

Lynn doesn't make any bones about her humble roots, as already recounted in the book and movie, "Coal Miner's Daughter." She mentions that her daddy's favorite meal was "possum," which her mother surrounded with sweet potatoes.

"Our family had pork, and we had chicken now and then. Outside of that, it was taters and beans, friends. If it wasn't for taters and beans, I wouldn't be sitting here writing to you."

The cookbook tells of childhood Christmases in Kentucky when she was lucky to get peanuts, an apple and some hard candy. One year, she cried because she didn't get anything, and her mother said it was because the snow was too deep. Then the door suddenly opened and a man with a bandana around his face stormed in and poured out some hard candy on her bed.

"I said, 'See Mommy! I told you Santa Claus was going to come!' Really, it was my cousin Lee Dollarhide. He'd robbed the candy store. That was one of the great Christmases I remember."

She also shares her cooking mistakes, like the first time she used a pressure cooker to make chili.

"I didn't know that you had to let the steam out of it. I didn't read too good at that time. While the chili was cooking, my sister Peggy and I took my guitar, and we sat at the table singing. All of a sudden we heard this racket going on, and that pressure cooker was shaking to beat the band . . . when we took the lid off, the whole dadgum thing hit the top of the ceiling. We had chili all over the kitchen."

If you're a Lynn fan, you'll love the entertaining vignettes told in her folksy style, and the snapshots scattered throughout the book.

While some of the recipes look pretty good, Lynn adds a warning. "I never had measured anything in my life, so I can't promise it will all turn out. If it don't, blame Nancy since this was her idea."

E-mail: vphillips@desnews.com