Introduction

Nana’s Kitchen

Simple country recipes for simple country folks...

This book is in memory of Frances S Sprague – known to her grandchildren as Nana.  It is a collection of the recipes she used throughout my lifetime to prepare meals that were simple, good, and fit for royalty. 

Nana, known as Frances to family and her friends, Aunt Frances to her nieces and nephews, and Mrs. Sprague to my friends, was a country girl.  She grew up on a farm near Palmyra Missouri with 9 brothers and sisters.  She weathered the depression where her father lost their farm.  She taught school in a one-room country school after she graduated from high school.  She contracted typhoid fever the first year she taught and after recovering traveled to her older sister’s home in Yakima Oregon, where she packed fruit on fruit ranches and eventually became a live-in house keeper and cook for a wealthy family in Yakima. 

At this job in Yakima she combined her good country cooking with the more elegant and sophisticated ways of this wealthy family.  She learned style, grace, presentation, and learned the preparation of many different foods.

Frances came back home to Illinois when her family called to let her know that her youngest sister, Dorothy, was dying.  She came home on a bus with one suitcase and no money.  She often told me that she knew once she got home she would have a place to stay, a warm bed, and food to eat.  She got off the bus in Hannibal – unsure if her message that she was coming and when she would arrive had got through to her family.  So she started to walk the 8 miles from Hannibal to Hull, IL.  She had only gotten a few blocks when an old model T pulled up, and her brother, sister, and mom were there to get her. 

Her sister did not live much longer and Frances decided to stay home with her family.  So she moved back to Hull and eventually married my father who worked for the electric company, Union Electric.  His parents built them a home for their wedding present.  The house is on property that had been the farmland of my father’s grandmother, Sara.  Dad eventually was drafted into WW II; mom became the postmaster of Hull. Dad returned at the end of the war.  I was born in 1946, and Frances/mom/Nana became one of the celebrated cooks of Pike County Illinois.

As I write these recipes I will tell you some of my memories of how they came to be in Nana’s cookbook and the stories of her preparing this food.  Both of my sons inherited her love of cooking.  They are both good cooks and although they each have their own style of cooking, a meal at either of their tables is like sitting at my mom’s table again.

As I copy these recipes I will copy them in her words; which I hope makes them more meaningful and interesting for the reader.