Every fall, just about the time the leaves hinted at changing the colours, my mother would dig into the kitchen cupboard and pull out a cloth-covered book. Stained by many fingers and stuffed with odd bits of paper, some handwritten, others cut from various magazines, some even cut from the back of cardboard boxes. In these pages were the collected recipes of my family. It is the legacy left for the next generation of women that ruled the kitchen and fed the men coming in from the harvest. 

My grandma would prepare a full turkey dinner, load it into her mobile kitchen. Grandpa had built out of plywood and would unfold, revealing storage for plates and cutlery, the warming oven, a hot plate, and a serving area. She would feed the entire harvest crew in the dark in the middle of a stubble field from her staging area.

Ma’s Backroad Cooking is a collection of some recipes from that treasured collection. Some were kept back at the request of Ma. She said they were the secret recipes.