As you've probably figured out, I collect cookbooks. Our hobby used to be going from town to town looking for used book stores and I had plenty of opportunities to add to my collection. I always looked at what I call 'church lady cookbooks' that are collections of recipes from the members of an organization put together into books to sell as a fundraiser. I didn't buy every one of them I saw, and probably 60% of the recipes are found in every other church lady cookbook in the United States, but if there was an interesting pie recipe that I'd never seen before, I bought it.

One of my favorites, and I don't know where I bought it because we've never been that town, is the Atalantean Club Cookbook from Memphis, Texas. Memphis is in the panhandle, nearest large city is Amarillo, 64 miles away to the northwest, and it's not far from Oklahoma City. The current population is around 2400.



Hall County courthouse, in Memphis, Texas:


The Atalantean Club was organized in 1928, one of the hundreds of womens' literary clubs in the Lone Star State. The object of the club was 'to promote interest in literature; stimulate intellectual growth; and strengthen individual effort among its members. The activities included fundraisers to support the City Library, decorating the nursery at the Hall County Hospital. They also went on historical and pleasure tours and celebrated every year with an Anniversary Breakfast the last week of January. I can't find anything about it on today's Internet, so I fear this particular club is no more. My Google search did come up with a book about the many literary clubs in Texas in years gone by:

Lone Star Chapters: The Story of Texas Literary Clubs

I like to sit and read this cookbook like a novel because besides many unique recipes, the names of the contributors are very interesting. My edition was published in the early 1980s, judging from the glasses frames on some of the 18 members in the group photo, so some of the recipes are attributed to names "Mrs. J. Robert Hanvey, Jr," the old style way instead of using her first name. Others use this form: "Mrs. Andy (Patricia) Gardenhire." Yes, Gardenhire is somebody's real last name.

Here are some other first names for the ladies:
LaWayne (I suppose her daddy or grandaddy was Wayne)
Phaeton
Myrtis
Glynn
Araminta

and here's some last names I'd never heard of:
Coppedge
Gardenhire
Goodpasture
Pallmeyer
Sexmauer


I like these mens' first names:
Hurley Moreman (husband of Biffie)
Riley Carlton
Dub Parker

These remind me of an obituary I recenlty saw in the Cortez, Colorado paper. A man named Reginald Archie something had died, and I recognized him by his occupation - he drove a road grader for the county for his entire working career - and everyone called him Dopey, even to his face.