When Cassandra Burquette accompanies a group of middle-aged women on a day trip to the small Florida village where she grew up, her travels take her much farther than she could have foreseen -- back to 1958 to a long-forgotten Osceola (named for a war-mongering Seminole chief grabbed from beneath a white flag of truce -- shame on those disreputable Yankee skunks ") and the heat of an unforgettable summer that stirred her first womanly feelings. The sleepy little village is no more. All that remain are a few old buildings, including a used bookstore, where she finds a 1958 fundraising cookbook, Sauti Then Simmer, put together by the Osceola Community Club. In it are advertisements from merchants she remembers and recipes submitted by people she knew when she was a young girl. The recipes remind her of the townspeople and of the bittersweet summer in which she turned twelve, the same year the cookbook was published. The Osceola Community Club sizzles as only a small Southern village of the fifties can sizzle. In typical Southern fashion, everything in the community revolves around a tableful of traditions: edible, ethical, and moral. Readers are invited to sit at this table alongside the townsfolk during the preparations, the presentations, and the social implications that are cooked up, stirred up, and served up -- community-style -- for all to see. Come taste the completed recipes with tongue and heart. Pull up a chair. Grab that old cowhide-bottomed one Grandpa whittled."
This book is for anyone that wants to escape to his or her youth. It is a great book for a weekend. Cuddle yourself on a feather mattress, with a goose down comforter snuggled around you. Lying your head on a feather pillow that is covered with a soft cotton pillowcase. Are you in heaven? No! You are in the South in the 1950's. You will awake when it is all over. There has to be more to come. Dear Author is there?
Engaging Style
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
D.H. Eaton wrote a lively novel in an engaging style that keeps the reader eagerly flipping pages. The central character, a recently widowed Southern lady, recounts her youth as it relates to recipes in an old fundraising cookbook she finds at a used bookstore in Central Florida. Do the characters from the narrator's past match the recipes they submitted? Read the book and judge for yourself. The accessible language, varied recipes, advertisements from the cookbook, and quaint drawings make "The Osceola Community Club" a delight to read. Leslie Halpern, author of Reel Romance: The Lovers' Guide to the 100 Best Date Movies and Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and Science.
D. H. Eaton's Down Home Delights
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
I've read many sensory stories in my time, but I can think of only two that made me hungry: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and The Osceola Community Club. Remember all those delectable dishes in Irving's "Legend"? Those "heaped-up platters of cakes"! Those "dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey"! Well, Darlene Eaton gives us equally tasty fare in The Osceola Community Club. "Hoppin' John," "Bird of Paradise," "Copper Pennies," "Sweet Potato Muggin," "Lazy Gal Brunswick Stew," "Poverty Chili"----just a few of the down-home delights in this novel! No, I won't give away any recipe. Read the book; enjoy the cooking and much more. This much more includes an extraordinary variety of story food served up by Cassandra Burquette, Eaton's main character/narrator. In 2002 Cassandra arrives in Osceola, Florida, with a group of clubwomen for a day of antiquing. She barely recognizes this time-forgotten village where as a child she spent many hours visiting her grandmother Nanny Ellie and her cousin Della. In "a hole of a bookstore," Cassandra finds Osceola's Favorite Foods Compiled by the Osceola Community Club, 1958. This "fundraiser of a cookbook" arouses memories of an unforgettable summer when Cassandra was 12 and felt her first womanly stirrings. As she relishes the cookbook, Cassandra also recalls later experiences, like her "Take Us Back" speech at the reunion of her 1964 high school class. Some of her memories stand alone as delightful stories like the "Civil Defense" tale (featured on the Fresh and Ripe page of this web site). Others sparkle as vignettes, like this one: "Christmas Eve morn. 1958. And colder 'n bare babies' butts hangin' downside in an outhouse. Granddaddy indulged my Nanny Ellie with the luxury of a nighttime burr pot beneath her bed. But the rest of us had to hustle our shivering butts to the outhouse, flashlight in hand, cold be damned. Don't never let anybody tell you it don't get cold in Florida. There's more to Florida than Miami Beach, folks. Wind could evermore rip snort up and down Nanny Ellie's hill, I'm here to testify...." Eaton gives us Southern characters we've seen before and endows them with her own fresh vitality: For example, the no-nonsense grandmother, tough and straight-talking on the outside, loving and caring on the inside; the extra special childhood friend you told your secrets to; the stupid, self righteous preacher; admirable eccentrics; snooty girls; horny boys; gossipers; racist Christians; devious aristocrats; segregated blacks with deferential masks for whites; Atticus-Finch-like whites who defend the downtrodden; and others-all of whom give us vivid insights into small-town Florida of the 1950's. On just about every page, Eaton puts a picture, drawing, or icon. These devices plus the recipes complement and underscore setting, characters, and action. To my mind, the author's shining achievement is Cassandra Burquette. Perky
Novel crafts culture through recipes
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
When I first heard about D. H. Eaton's novel, I thought it sounded like a fantastic idea. The novel wove stories of the residents of a small town by means of recipes culled from a cookbook. The narrator finds the book in a store that sells used books. I'd met D. H. and through various conversations, felt quite a kinship with her. Our Southern upbringing coupled with the fact that we were both writers made for a broad stretch of common ground. She'd invited me to two different literary events, even featured some of my poetry at one of them. On both occasions, last minute problems with my younger child kept me from attending. My opinion of D. H. was based entirely on a social assessment. She's one of those women who has a natural grace about her. She has an energy that is contagious. She looks good in hats. And she is never, ever dull. I had no idea what to expect of her novel, however. I'd never read anything she'd written. She'd been kind enough to send me a copy of her book. If the author is known to me, I try very hard to be objective, to look at the work with an even keener eye than I'd apply to the work of a stranger. Of late, I've been preoccupied with a manuscript deadline and other projects. But a few days ago, I was having my lunch and needed something to read. I read a few pages and was immediately put out with myself for picking the book up. I found I could not put it down. In truth, I had too many things to do to get involved with a book, particularly a novel. But I was drawn into D.H. Eaton's novel in much the same way a bee is drawn to clover. Within the pages of her book, an entire town comes alive. Each recipe in the fictitious cookbook is listed with the name of the contributor. Using the cookbook as a literary device is very effective. We see Charmaine Mosley's "Banana Salad" recipe, and the chapter it introduces relates the story of the Mosley family. In addition, each recipe builds into a composite whole that draws a picture of a culture, the Southern culture I knew and now recall with the same bittersweet emotions the narrator, Cassandra, carries to the end of the book. I do not think it an accident, the choice of name for the heroine in the book. Cassandra, in some versions of ancient mythology, received the gift of prophecy from the god, Apollo. In Ms. Eaton's novel, Cassandra offers a historical account of Southern life that begins around 1958 and continues to the present, and within that account, the history of a small town, like so many, that, through growth and change, became quite a different place entirely. Just as the mythological Cassandra's warnings were ignored, so are the warnings of many, including the narrator in the novel, who caution that the culture we value will in time be lost. As I read the book, each recipe, like the little cakes in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, propelled me backwards, to my own upbringing and coming of age in a small Southern town. Food
The Osceola Community Club
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
A tasty tale to be read with a super sweet iced tea and the smell of homemade biscuits baking in the oven.
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