I happened upon a cookbook and it took me to a place I once knew
Sometimes a chance encounter can connect past with present in a wondrous way
Back in September we paid a visit to my favorite used bookstore. It’s called the Rodgers Book Barn in Hillsdale, New York, and it occupies the barn of an 1800s farmhouse way, way off the beaten track. It’s a hideaway for book lovers owned by Maureen Rodgers, a native of England who opened it with her husband 50 years ago and has crammed it with some 20,000 titles.
[My neighbor, Robbi Hartt, wrote a lovely story about the store in the Berkshire Edge last June, which you can read here.]
The Book Barn is a magical place where you can find yourself transported back in time. That’s kind of what happened to me that day. I was with my family and we all spread out to different rooms, finding nooks and crannies, guided by interest and whimsy. At one point, unsurprisingly if you know me, I found myself along a wall reserved for cookbooks.
As I gazed at the titles, my eyes were drawn to an unassuming little white-bound book on a shelf just above the floor. I pulled it out and there on the cover were the words The Loaf and Ladle Cook Book adorned with an emblem depicting two soup ladles and a slice of bread. The title sat above a drawing of a quaint one-story storefront with yellow siding, two green doors and green and white awnings over the windows.
I knew this place.
It was in Exeter, New Hampshire, and the Loaf and Ladle restaurant was once a favorite spot for lunch. I didn’t go there often but my future wife Katie and I would stop there on occasion for one of its delicious sandwiches or hearty bowls of soup, always served with a generous slice of bread. I can still recall a tuna salad sandwich served on thick, crusty white bread made extra special because it was infused with fresh dill. It was an intimate, slightly rundown restaurant in keeping with the back-to-the-Earth spirit of the 1970s, a great setting for a nourishing meal on a brisk New Hampshire winter day.
Although I’d only rarely thought of the Loaf and Ladle in the years that followed, I’d never forgotten it. Suddenly in an old barn in a tiny village on the border of New York and Massachusetts I found myself overwhelmed with memories of when we lived near the New Hampshire coast, studied and began our careers.
Naturally I bought the book and soon found myself thumbing through the recipes, which transported me back to that time in our lives when we ate a lot of soups, most, I recall, loaded with copious amounts of cheddar cheese. The cookbook’s soup chapter alone runs 74 pages. There’s an entire section that begins with the words “Cream of Anything Soup” (Asparagus, Broccoli, Broccoli Bisque, Cauliflower, Celery, Mushroom, Spinach, Spud and Spinach, Watercress, Swiss Cheese and Onion, and Cheddar.) And there’s a section devoted to chowders that begins, “Is there another word that is so singularly evocative of New England as chowder?” Not really. There are recipes for a “Basic Chowder,” “Fish Chowder,” “Clam Chowder,” “Shrimp Chowder” and “Seafood Chowder,” and a page titled, simply, “Other Chowders.” An “Odd Bowls” section includes some odd ones: “Eggplant Supper Soup,” “Spanish Oatmeal Soup,” “Apple Lime Soup,” even “Chocolate Soup.”
I’d be doing the cookbook injustice without saying it also has dozens of recipes for main courses, including one for Hasenpfeffer, which I seem to remember my mother talking about but never preparing, and one for Bigos, which I was graciously served on numerous occasions at apartments owned by Poles during our years living in Warsaw. There are recipes for salads, desserts, breads and beverages, among them something called Switchel (combine 1 gallon apple cider, 1 cup vinegar, 1 ½ cups molasses, ginger and oatmeal). It’s a precursor to sports drinks. “On a hot summer day when there is strenuous work that must be done such as haying, this drink not only tastes good, it replaces, without bloating, liquids that have been lost,” the book says. It adds: “The oatmeal in the bottom is better to chew on than candy.” Not that I ordered any of these at the restaurant. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure they were even on the menu back then, though given that we were on student budgets we rarely got beyond the section for soups or sandwiches anyway.
Finally, as if to reassure me I hadn’t just imagined all of this, there on page 165 was the Loaf and Ladle’s recipe for “Dilly Bread.’ In addition to the usual mix of flour, yeast and water it contains 2 large mashed potatoes and 1 ½ tablespoons of dill.
All of this is a roundabout way of getting to what I really wanted to say about finding this cookbook at the Rodgers Book Barn. Which is that the intricate web of experiences that form our lives can intersect in unforeseen and wondrous ways, transporting us to other times and places and somehow connecting them to our present.
After returning home with the Loaf and Ladle cookbook, I placed it on one of the shelves reserved for cookbooks in our dining room. My plan was to get back to it, certainly to make Dilly Bread, and try out some of the soups. The other day I mistakenly opened one too many jars of roasted tomatoes from our garden that we had put up a couple months ago. Not wanting to waste it, I thought about making chili or a stew. But then I figured, let’s make tomato soup and let’s see what the Loaf and Ladle cookbook had to say.
Its Cream of Tomato is a simple recipe: Make a sofrito of onions, carrots and green pepper, add pureed tomatoes and chicken or vegetable stock, plus some basil, salt and pepper, bring it to a boil and let it simmer for a bit. It also calls for thickening the soup by making a roux by adding equal amounts of flour and oil to the stock. (I used olive oil and a smaller amount than called for.) It’s a step I don’t see included much in soup recipes nowadays, what with our heightened focus on healthier eating and using vegetables and legumes as thickening agents, aided by a handy immersion blender. It took me back a few decades, which was a nice place to be for a few minutes.
I googled the Loaf and Ladle and found it had closed in 2013 after nearly 40 years on Water Street in Exeter. That’s an impressive run for any restaurant. Joan Harlow, the restaurant’s founder and chef, who wrote and published the cookbook in 1979, sold it in the mid-1980s. By then Katie and I had moved to New York and then overseas, and while we haven’t been back to Exeter, I stumbled upon a book that restored my most lasting memory of the town and provided an open door for returning to it through our garden and the things we can cook from it.
Wonderful story. I love the total immersion feel of your new local book store and the evoking of memories that can come from a visit.