Cooking On Iron
From James Donahue’s Journal
Doris always excelled in cooking. She also collected cookbooks. She liked to go to garage sales and flea markets and rummage around for interesting things like old cookbooks, iron pots and pans, and various decorative nick-knacks to decorate our homes. I always thought she was an artist in the way she made every place we lived look bright and cheerful in the way she arranged things on tables, shelves and counters.
After we bought and hooked up our wood burning cook stove in the Elk Creek Road house, Doris began using that stove in earnest. When home on weekends or during the winter holidays, we would fire up that stove and she would prepare some amazing meals. She cooked bread, baked turkey, squash and all kinds of wonderful dishes in and on that stove.
After the success we had with the book Fiery Trial, the idea occurred to us one day to collect some of the best of the old-fashioned, century old recipes from some of the very old cookbooks Doris had gathered and produce a new cookbook filled with forgotten recipes. We went to work on the project and soon had a number of amazingly good recipes to put in that book. I put them all together, in a variety of categories ranging from meat and vegetable and desert dishes to old methods of making soap. Most of the recipes called for a “pinch” of this or that, and the use of lard or butter. I remember some of the soup, bread and especially the corn bread recipes were among our personal favorites.
Jennifer was working at the Harvest Haus Restaurant at the time and they served corn bread during their Friday night all-you-can-eat fish fries. But their corn bread was flat compared to the one in our book. Jennifer introduced the restaurant to our recipe and they tried it. The recipe went over so well they used it from then on. We knew that when we had fish at the Harvest Haus on Friday night the corn bread was going to be good.
After we had our book written, the next problem was getting it published. John Savage came to our rescue. He offered to be our publisher, helped us put all of the information together in book form. We picked the name Cooking On Iron for a title. We hired a type setter in Caro to set the pages for our book and the Tuscola County Advertiser contracted to do the printing and binding. I learned a lot about publishing during the production of that little book.
Once published, we had about a thousand copies of our little cookbook on our hands, we made a relatively large investment but had no way of selling our books except to promote them in news stories that I sent to area newspapers. I advertised in the Times Herald and various other papers, soliciting for mail orders. The few we received barely paid the cost paid in advertising.
I tried national magazine advertising and hit a dud. We got a few orders, but never enough to cover the cost paid for the ad. I bought books on advertising and studied the art of writing ads that sell. The words “free” and “new” were keys to a successful promotion. We started sliding a sheet of special cookie recipes in each book and promoted “free cookie recipes” with every order. That helped, but sales still were below expectation.
I began going door-to-door, hawking our book and made a few sales, but that was hard, taxing work for the return that we received. Unlike the publication of Fiery Trial, Doris and I were rarely invited to public gatherings to talk about our cook book. We had one such invitation and spiced it up by bringing some fresh baked bread and other foods appearing in our book. We not only talked about our book, but let people taste samples of the food. We sold quite a few books that night.
Our next experiment touched off our next great adventure . . . flea marketing. Aaron and I took off one weekend with the car filled with books and a lot of other miscellaneous items, plus a folding table, two folding chairs, a cooler filled with ice, pop and sandwiches, and we drove to a highly publicized flea market at a festival near Alpena. We set up there for the day, had a good time, and actually sold a few books. But we sold more of the other things we brought to put on our table.
And that was when Doris and I got the big idea of setting up at flea markets. That hobby became a dominating influence on our lives for quite a while after that.
From James Donahue’s Journal
Doris always excelled in cooking. She also collected cookbooks. She liked to go to garage sales and flea markets and rummage around for interesting things like old cookbooks, iron pots and pans, and various decorative nick-knacks to decorate our homes. I always thought she was an artist in the way she made every place we lived look bright and cheerful in the way she arranged things on tables, shelves and counters.
After we bought and hooked up our wood burning cook stove in the Elk Creek Road house, Doris began using that stove in earnest. When home on weekends or during the winter holidays, we would fire up that stove and she would prepare some amazing meals. She cooked bread, baked turkey, squash and all kinds of wonderful dishes in and on that stove.
After the success we had with the book Fiery Trial, the idea occurred to us one day to collect some of the best of the old-fashioned, century old recipes from some of the very old cookbooks Doris had gathered and produce a new cookbook filled with forgotten recipes. We went to work on the project and soon had a number of amazingly good recipes to put in that book. I put them all together, in a variety of categories ranging from meat and vegetable and desert dishes to old methods of making soap. Most of the recipes called for a “pinch” of this or that, and the use of lard or butter. I remember some of the soup, bread and especially the corn bread recipes were among our personal favorites.
Jennifer was working at the Harvest Haus Restaurant at the time and they served corn bread during their Friday night all-you-can-eat fish fries. But their corn bread was flat compared to the one in our book. Jennifer introduced the restaurant to our recipe and they tried it. The recipe went over so well they used it from then on. We knew that when we had fish at the Harvest Haus on Friday night the corn bread was going to be good.
After we had our book written, the next problem was getting it published. John Savage came to our rescue. He offered to be our publisher, helped us put all of the information together in book form. We picked the name Cooking On Iron for a title. We hired a type setter in Caro to set the pages for our book and the Tuscola County Advertiser contracted to do the printing and binding. I learned a lot about publishing during the production of that little book.
Once published, we had about a thousand copies of our little cookbook on our hands, we made a relatively large investment but had no way of selling our books except to promote them in news stories that I sent to area newspapers. I advertised in the Times Herald and various other papers, soliciting for mail orders. The few we received barely paid the cost paid in advertising.
I tried national magazine advertising and hit a dud. We got a few orders, but never enough to cover the cost paid for the ad. I bought books on advertising and studied the art of writing ads that sell. The words “free” and “new” were keys to a successful promotion. We started sliding a sheet of special cookie recipes in each book and promoted “free cookie recipes” with every order. That helped, but sales still were below expectation.
I began going door-to-door, hawking our book and made a few sales, but that was hard, taxing work for the return that we received. Unlike the publication of Fiery Trial, Doris and I were rarely invited to public gatherings to talk about our cook book. We had one such invitation and spiced it up by bringing some fresh baked bread and other foods appearing in our book. We not only talked about our book, but let people taste samples of the food. We sold quite a few books that night.
Our next experiment touched off our next great adventure . . . flea marketing. Aaron and I took off one weekend with the car filled with books and a lot of other miscellaneous items, plus a folding table, two folding chairs, a cooler filled with ice, pop and sandwiches, and we drove to a highly publicized flea market at a festival near Alpena. We set up there for the day, had a good time, and actually sold a few books. But we sold more of the other things we brought to put on our table.
And that was when Doris and I got the big idea of setting up at flea markets. That hobby became a dominating influence on our lives for quite a while after that.