The Bluestem Kitchen

Six generations of women. One Kansas farmhouse. Seventy five recipes that were never written down until now.

For almost a hundred years, the women of the Townsend farm fed their families, their neighbors, the harvest crews, and every stranger who came up the lane hungry. Sarah kept her recipes in pencil in the back of the horse ledger. Birdie kept hers on the labels of the jars she sold in Dodge City. Ruby kept hers in her hands. Most of them were never written down at all. They were carried, from the woman at the stove to the younger one standing beside her, watching.

The Bluestem Kitchen gathers those recipes at last, one kitchen at a time, from 1891 to 1986. Each woman introduces her own dishes in her own voice, with the stories behind the meals that carried the family through a prairie fire, the 1918 flu, the Dust Bowl, wartime rationing, and the long quiet winters in between.

Inside you will find:

• Prairie staples like Sarah’s everyday bread, skillet cornbread, pot beans with salt pork, and Mrs. Whitaker’s buttermilk biscuits
• Kansas heritage dishes from the Mennonite and German kitchens east of town: harvest bierocks, zwieback, verenike with ham gravy, spätzle, and Christmas peppernuts
• Depression and wartime cooking that made every egg count, including ten cent potato soup with rivels and Ruby’s ration chocolate cake
• Pies and cakes for every occasion, from burnt sugar cake and sour cream raisin pie to a white wedding cake baked for a June wedding under the cottonwood
• The Cellar Shelf, a complete canning chapter with step by step water bath and pressure canning instructions written to current USDA guidance, altitude tables, and twenty recipes for preserves, pickles, apple butter, tomatoes, green beans, stock and more

The measures are modern and the methods are safe. The voices are the family’s own.

You do not need to have read the Bluestem novels to cook from this book. If you have, you already know these kitchens, and now you can find out what was in the pot on the nights the stories only mentioned.

A companion to the Bluestem series by Jeffrey Rittenhouse: Where the Bluestem Grows, Where the Bluestem Bends, Where the Bluestem Stands, Where the Bluestem Holds, Where the Bluestem Unites and Where the Bluestem Returns.