Missing cookbook shows up after 40 years
Racine woman’s cookbook mysteriously reappears after 40 years
A Racine woman is reunited with the cookbook that seemingly disappeared from her home in the early 1970s.
Runaway cookbook! Even with the exclamation point, it lacks the drama of, say, a train out of control or a bride bolting on her wedding day.
But this was Bernice Kissinger’s favorite cookbook, and one day it just took off. That day, if Bernice had to guess, was in the early 1970s.
“It just plain disappeared,” the 89-year-old Racine woman said. “I blamed my youngest daughter. I said, ‘Did you throw that out?’ I looked everywhere. I looked in every box of whatever, went through magazines, went through everything. I hunted probably for months looking for this cookbook, and finally I just gave up.”
Well, she didn’t exactly give up. Over the years, she would tell her sister living in the small borough of Terre Hill, Pa., to be on the lookout for another copy of the missing 72-page book.
That’s where Bernice grew up, and also where the cookbook came from. Bernice and other mothers of children in a Sunday school program in Terre Hill put it together in the early 1950s, with their own recipes and those of other cooks and bakers in town. The popular book went to a second printing in 1965.
Bernice contributed a few recipes, including her buttermilk flapjacks and devil’s food cake.
“And then I had a deep-dish apple pie, and they misprinted my name in there and they never did correct it. So that was a laugh. The recipe was correct but the name was spelled Kissington and the first name was Bertice,” said Bernice, who pronounces her name to rhyme with furnace.
She moved to Racine in 1956 when her late husband, John, took a job in Wisconsin. Bernice, who retired from nursing at age 75, still lives in the same house where they raised their two daughters.
Last month, she looked in her mailbox and there was a package from her sister in Terre Hill, Joan Eberly. It was the red-covered cookbook, but not simply a replacement copy.
“I called her and I said, ‘Joan, that’s my book. Not just anybody’s book. That’s my book.’ My handwriting is in there. I wrote inside the front cover, ‘Chocolate cake on page 35.’ That’s mine. I mean, what are the odds?”
A piano student of Joan’s, one of many antique-seekers she deputized to find the cookbook, located it at an auction house in Farmersville, a Mennonite settlement near Terre Hill. The student, a lady in her 70s, didn’t say what she paid for it, though it couldn’t have been much. She wouldn’t let Joan give her any money.
So how did the cookbook get from Bernice’s house to southeastern Pennsylvania? She is sure she never brought it there. Her theory is that one of the many visitors she received from back home accidentally picked it up.
“They would have let me know they had my book, but my name was not in it,” Bernice said.
The book shows no wear and tear from its 40-plus AWOL years, no new scribbling in the margins or spilled ingredients on the pages.
“Everything is the same. It looks like whoever had it stuck it in a corner and forgot about it,” Bernice said.
Her favorite cookbook now sits on a shelf near the stove, but with one addition to prevent this from happening again. Bernice slapped an address label on the back cover.