Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 3 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
And there's more, of course. I was an only child except for an older half-brother—seven years older—who grew up mostly with his relatives. So I had a very isolated childhood. There was nobody for me to play with so I grew very close to my animals and I had a deep hunger for people. I wanted to reach out . . . to make friends . . . to give so I could be given unto . . . to love so I could be loved. The book has made that all possible. I've reached out through my writing and many beautiful people have responded.
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PLOWBOY: But how did the Old Fashioned Recipe Book come to be, Carla? I read somewhere—in one of the clippings about you that someone sent me—that you ran an ad saying the book was available before it had even been started. Then you cashed the checks as they came in. And, finally, when you couldn't send the money back to the would-be purchasers . . . you had no choice but to sit down and write a book and make good on your original promise.
EMERY: No, I'm not that bad. Well, yes. . . I'm almost that bad. But it's a long story like all my long stories. See, here's what really happened:
My mother-in-law gave me a subscription to Organic Gardening back in 1970. And I got to reading the magazine and I saw all the letters it contained from people who wanted to raise their own food but didn't know where to begin. People who wanted to know how to make sauerkraut and sausage, or butcher a cow and tan its hide or grind grain.
Well five years ago—when MOTHER was just getting started and I hadn't even heard of it yet anyway—there weren't any magazines that carried this information. So I said to myself that what these people needed was a book. A great, large book like an encyclopedia that tells everything you need to know to raise your own food and process it and raise food for animals and so on. A big, dependable guide to self-sufficiency that's written simply and clearly.
PLOWBOY: A collection of good, down-home advice.
EMERY: Right. Just like your country neighbor up the road would give you if you needed it.
And I thought, "Hey! I could write that book because I was raised in the country and I've been to school and I've done term papers. I can tell people how to make sauerkraut and sausage."
Well we were living on three and a half acres then and we had goats and chickens that were coming out the sides of our property and I thought, "Oh. I'll help Mike. I'll write this book and I'll sell it and we'll earn money and get our bigger piece of land."
So I got this copy of Organic Gardening and I looked in the back and I saw that I could place a little classified ad and that it would take two full months for the ad to appear after I sent it in. So I asked myself how long it would take me to write my book and I figured I could do it in two months, easy. I figured I could send in my ad and then work really hard writing about how to make sauerkraut and sausage and then in two months—when the ad came out—I'd have the book done.
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