- Paperback: 230 pages
- Publisher: Scholarly Book Services Inc (Jun 27 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807847909
- ISBN-13: 978-0807847909
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #759,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
You can hold this book the way you hold a child's hand. And you can let this book show you a whole new world, the way a child will reveal the secrets of a secret world if you take the time to stop and watch and listen. God bless Mildred Council and the time she took to get it all down in Mama Dip's Kitchen. And it's not just the recipes that come out of a life of good cooking--there's a great deal of Mildred Council in these pages, and we are better off for the reading, the cooking, and the sharing.
In her acknowledgments, Mildred Council thanks a woman who helped with the book. Then she thanks the woman's children, "Shawn and Chelsea, for playing so nicely while we flipped so many pages." She ends her cookbook with a recipe for a child's birthday party. Her enthusiasm for life growing through all its stages can be found on every page. "I realized my name was my earthly soul," she writes, "which needed to be tended like the pumpkin seed--tended, tilled, fed, and harvested, to have a good life. And that's what I tried to do ever since for my family and myself."
Part of that tending has been owning and operating Dip's, a popular Chapel Hill, North Carolina restaurant where she serves the kind of country food she grew up cooking. Mildred Council calls her style of cooking "dump cooking" because she scoops up ingredients without measuring and "dumps" them in the bowl or pan. It took her a good deal of time to measure out what she was doing so instinctively to be able to share her work as written recipes. But she encourages every cook to use her recipes like a sewing pattern, to experiment, to stretch here and cut there to make the food you like.
Mama Dip's Kitchen is a compendium of straightforward, simple, southern American foods in chapters devoted to "Breads and Breakfast Dishes," "Poultry, Fish, and Seafood Dishes," "Beef, Pork and Lamb Dishes," "Vegetables and Salad," and "Desserts, Beverages, and Party Dishes." In simple foods as in a simple life, the complexities run deep. --Schuyler Ingle
From Library Journal
In this memoir/cookbook, Council, a popular restaurant owner in North Carolina, explains her famous "dump cooking" method of preparing food, which means no recipes, just measuring by eye, feel, taste, and testing. She also includes 250 of her favorite dishes.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I was born a colored baby girl in Chatham County, North Carolina, to Ed Cotton and Effie Edwards Cotton; grew up a Negro in my youth; lived my adult life black; and am now a 70-year-old American. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
I was born a colored baby girl in Chatham County, North Carolina, to Ed Cotton and Effie Edwards Cotton; grew up a Negro in my youth; lived my adult life black; and am now a 70-year-old American. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mama Dip's Kitchen,
By A Customer
This review is from: Mama Dip's Kitchen (Paperback)
So often, cookbooks have ingredients that are difficult to find, or recipes that just don't fit into your everyday schedules and tastes...NOT this one. This is one of the best cookbooks that I've ever found. It has good, common-sense cooking in it....and delicious recipes....lots of comfort food, too. It would be a wonderful addition to any kitchen, and will be a book that you reach for time and time again.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Base for Southern Soul Cooking,
By
This review is from: Mama Dip's Kitchen (Paperback)
This book starts out with a delightful autobiographical story of Mildred Council and her life of cooking for her large family, and later opening a restaurant. She talks about using local, seasonal ingredients. Unlike most foodies, this knowledge was necessary for survival of her poor sharecropper family. I found this short story worth the price of the book alone.A transplanted Midwesterner in California, I bough this book to expand my cooking skills to include southern cooking / soul food. The recipes are all pretty simple, suspiciously simple suggesting a few trade secrets have been left out. Ms. Council admits as much, encouraging the reader to experiment and play around with her recipes. That's nice, and I respect Mama Dip's need to hold family/trade secrets, but I would have preferred more insight into how to experiment, to guide the reader. (A good example is Paul Kirk's Championship BBQ Sauces, where the secrets are not revealed, but plenty of insight is given for the reader to develop their own secret sauce.) Thankfully, there are cooking tips here and there, often given out in a folksy manner. Certainly one of the best things about this book is that with so many simple recipes, everyone will benefit from it. Some of the recipes were surprisingly good in their simplicity. The Creole Shrimp, Fried Okra, and Fried Catfish turned out great. (Per Mama Dip's encouragement, I added a couple of my own ingredients to the mix.) The Baked Beans had a muddy taste, without much character to it. A couple others turned out a little bland. I have some philosophical differences with Mama Dip's Pecan Pie recipe. For the record, I think it needs brown sugar and perhaps some other ingredients for a richer, deeper flavor. Using light Karo syrup, butter, sugar, eggs, and pecans, and nothing else, I think Mama Dip's pecan pie tastes too light. (Of course, nobody is asking me to make my Pecan Pie on the Today Show as Ms Dip has, but that's what I think.) The fact that this book has resonated so well with Southern reviewers certainly means a lot, but I can't give a book five stars that seems to give out a number of incomplete recipes, and gives the reader little insight on how to round them out. And not everything turned out great. But don't get me wrong, I loved reading this book, and it's been a good tool to expand my cooking skills to include Southern Cooking/Soul Food.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Starter Recipes,
By
This review is from: Mama Dip's Kitchen (Paperback)
The recipes found in this book are a great place to start if you're trying to impress your new in-laws, or family. You will have to add seasonings here and there to put your family's mark on the dishes, but her measurements are accurate, and her instructions are precise. Rather than intimidate the novice cook, she offers some dishes that don't necessarily have to be made from scratch; a blessed opportunity to cheat a little when you're running low on time.I highly recommend the recipes for Sunday Cornbread, and biscuits. They come out perfect every time!
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