Once again, the Perinis have produced a keeper, a book that could be a Texas favorite for the next twenty years. And, as good as the stories are, they take a back seat to the recipes themselves, enhanced by wonderful photos and a handsome, inviting design. That’s no doubt the best story in the book (page eighty-five), but there are plenty of others. They were there to cater the president’s congressional picnic, but when airplanes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the picnic was canceled, and the food was sent over to the firefighters and other first responders. Bush, which is how they happened to be at the White House on 9-11. Vintage Recipe Project Exploring Recipes of Our Past 2 weeks ago. Perini’s became a favorite catering venue for Governor and then President George W. The Watkins New Cookbook originally published in 1936 found success with its first. Perini Ranch Steakhouse flourished as a destination restaurant. But then came a review in the New York Times naming the Perini beef tenderloin as the year’s best holiday mail-order gift, and other good things soon followed. In the book’s introduction Tom Perini outlines the history of the steakhouse, about fifteen miles south of Abilene, noting that in the early years he had to borrow money from his mother to make payroll. Readers will find most of their Perini favorites in the new book, along with the new recipes and new stories, including “Our Most Memorable Catering Job” -at the White House on September 11, 2001. Perini Ranch Steakhouse includes about 100 recipes and the stories behind them and twenty-five sidebar stories, collected in seven sections: The Cocktail Hour Salads Beef Pork, Bison, Lamb, Chicken, Seafood Side Dishes Biscuits and Bread and, of course, Desserts. I managed to get a sneak peek of the new cookbook-not the actual book but a digital copy of it-and, oh my, it is absolutely stunning. The book will be released at their Buffalo Gap steakhouse on Saturday and then to the public next week. When Carlton Stowers and I wrote 101 Essential Texas Books a few years ago, we listed it first in the section on cookbooks, commenting, “If you had to limit your collection of Texas cookbooks to just one book, this would be the one to keep.”īut now, after twenty years, the Perinis decided it was time to retire Texas Cowboy Cooking and bring out a brand-new book, filled with many of the same recipes but also some new ones, as well as new stories and dozens of exquisite, mouth-watering photos. Not that the old Perini cookbook, Texas Cowboy Cooking, was bad. Perini Ranch Steakhouse: Stories and Recipes for Real Texas Food ($34.95 hardcover) by Lisa and Tom Perini, partnering with veteran award-winning cookbook author Cheryl Alters Jamison and acclaimed food photographer Wyatt McSpadden, simply sets a new standard for cookbooks. Once CNN ran the piece, a number of other publications/web sites picked up the story also and it has taken off from there.Prepare to be blown away by the new Perini cookbook. I agreed and overnight went from a couple of hundred requests to over one thousand! It was the Holiday Season of 2021 and people were looking for a “feel-good” story. I wasn’t ready for what happened next.Īt the end of Nov of that year, I received an email from CNN News saying that they wanted to do a story about the cookbook. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a local charity called Carepacks for Kids and I felt confident that I could sell the 200 books I had ordered. When this happened, the local TV station came back out and did a second story. That led me to search out the original printer in Iowa and ultimately to have 200 books printed. This, plus the number of people that had requested copies got me to thinking about a reprint for charity. The next thing I knew, a local television station came to my house to do a story. When I posted the photo with an intro on Facebook, I started getting requests from people on how they could get one. But when I saw this cookbook, I thought “some of my old friends on Facebook might like to see this” so I took a couple of pictures and for some reason, I didn’t just pack it away. There were a number of cookbooks, this one among them, that I would just pack away for another day. My mother, Florice, had long ago passed on and I had sorted through most of her belongings. The book was titled Our Favorite Recipes and the author(s) are credited as the Abilene School Food Service Association. The book was titled “Our Favorite Recipes” and the author(s) are credited as the Abilene School Food Service Association.įast forward to 2021. In Feb of 1963, she was presented with a book of recipes that some of the cafeteria workers in the school district had assembled into a cookbook. It all started with my mother, Florice Hudgins, who was a cafeteria worker at Travis Elementary School in Abilene, Texas around 1961.
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