Apps Family Cookbook Opens Old Farm Recipe Box

Story master Jerry Apps returns with a warm-hearted Apps family anthology, Old Farm Country Cookbook: Recipes, Menus, and Memories. Joined by his daughter Susan Apps-Bodilly, Jerry shares the memories that footnote the family recipes plucked straight from matriarch Eleanor Apps’s well-worn, Depression era recipe box. From canned chicken and fresh peas in milk sauce to ring bologna and wild blueberry cobbler, this realistic study of food and farm life from the 1930s-50s guides us through a time when food was local, farming was a family affair, and homemade ice cream tasted better than anything you could buy at the store.

The Wisconsin Historical Society Press cookbook features many of the Depression era and Midwestern comfort food recipes often “forgotten” in traditional cookbooks. Seasoned with personal stories, menus and family photos, Old Farm Country Cookbook recalls a time when electricity had not yet found its way to the farm kitchen and almost every ingredient was “locally sourced.”

Apps has been a rural historian and environmental writer for more than 40 years. He is a former county extension agent and professor for the University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Jerry and his wife, Ruth, divide their time between their home in Madison and their farm, Roshara, in Waushara County.

Apps-Bodilly has been an elementary and middle school teacher for more than twenty years. She is the author of One Room Schools: Stories from the Days of 1 Room, 1 Teacher, 8 Grades. She lives in Madison with her husband Paul.

For more information or to buy a copy, visit wisconsinhistory.org/shop.