Women’s roles have indeed changed in the past 50 years. Will you think me presumptuous if I claim that cookbooks, especially those that are historically based, are more than collections of recipes? I contend they tell a great deal about the role that homemakers, until recently invariably women, were expected to play.

Without my quite realizing it as I researched the microfilm of The Daily Oklahoman from the 1930s and early ‘40s for "Aunt Susan’s" flavorful recipes, she was sharing her ideas about what an Oklahoma homemaker was supposed to be concerned with 60 years ago. Those long-ago newspaper readers wrote to Aunt Susan and she replied through her radio program and newspaper columns. Their conversations were not only about how to put together a special cake or to brown pork chops to perfection, they were also about the blessings of "modern" conveniences or Aunt Susan’s philosophy for surviving hard times. We enjoy historical cookbooks for their social history as much as for their recipes.

My first cookbook seemed incomplete to me. Some of you readers wrote to admonish, "How could you write an Oklahoma cookbook and leave out the recipe for ‘Red Earth Cake?’" Another friend allowed that I hadn’t properly appreciated "the best banana cake recipe in the whole world, or the recipe for Crispy Buttery Waffles, "so light you have to put a fork in ‘em to keep them from lifting right off the plate." Unintentionally, I hadn’t reached my goal of passing on all of the best of Aunt Susan’s remarkable recipes. SPICED WITH WIT contains over 400 additional treats for your table, many of them from Aunt Susan’s only cookbook, published in 1951 and identified in my book by the initials C.B.’51.

It seems that while I was writing about this one woman’s philosophy and life, I neglected to tell my readers anything about the ideas and influences that were shaping my dad’s world during this same time. It was never my aim to present feminine history alone; it becomes understandable only in the wider context of a particular time. Thus, I searched for a masculine voice that was influential during these years when I was growing up in Oklahoma. I wanted one that could speak for the countless decent, hard-working men who loved and provided for their families as best they could during the long difficult years of the Depression and dust bowl. Who personified and influenced the masculine point of view during the 1920’s and ‘30s better than Will Rogers?

Aunt Susan might derive satisfaction from a compote of exquisitely poached fruit a la Normandie, but Will got pleasure from beans cooked like his mother had made them on the ranch. Creative tension existed in the preferences of these two. Do these companion books create a fair mirror for my grandchildren to look into and to view the small world that their grandfather and I grew up in? I want them to glimpse the ideas that shaped our own family. This is what I have hoped to accomplish by bringing these two "Oklahoma Originals" together.

 P. V. MacD., 1992

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