FAMILY RECIPES AND STORIES COMBINED IN REGIONAL COOKBOOK

You can tell a lot about a region by the food the people eat, says Angie Holtzhouser, author of the new cookbook "Drop Dumplin's and Pan-Fried Memories ... Along the Mississippi"

"I read cookbooks like most people read novels," she says.

Holtzhouser was 10 years old when she made her first pecan pie as a surprise for her Daddy. Food and family stories have always been entwined for her.

The new cookbook, her first, combines mostly family recipes with family stories. These are tales about making music on Saturday nights or how white lightnin' turned the bridal shower her mother was hosting into a smashing success.

Alongside is a recipe of "White Lightnin' Party Punch."

Pictures of Holtzhouser's daughter, her son and daughter-in-law, her grandchild, her cousins, her in-laws and her grandfather are sprinkled throughout the book, which originally was intended only to tell family stories for a limited audience.

"But we don't do anything without eating," says Holtzhouser. "It was hard to separate the stories from the food."

The recipes come with names like "Martha's Fiesta Chicken" and "Aunt Susan's St. Louis Raisin Pie." "My Daddy's Favorite Pecan Pie" is there, too.

Her own favorite is her grandmother's recipe for "Tea Cake Cookies." She recalls sitting by the stove as a child while her grandmother baked them. "I got one hot cookie off each tray and I was the only person who got one," she recalls.

Many of Holtzhouser's family recipes hadn't been written down and required some trial runs to get the pinches of this and little bits of that right.

A Lilbourn resident who recently resigned as director of the New Madrid Chamber of Commerce, Holtzhouser had the marketing savvy to include recipes from a number of well-known restaurants along the Mississippi. The restaurants are helping sell the book.

Among the restaurants are Cape Girardeau's Royal N'Orleans, which supplied recipes for "Mr. Tibbs' Shrimp Creole," "Red Snapper in Ginger Court Bouillon" and "Cafe Brulot Diabolique Royal N'Orleans Style."

Holtzhouser signed copies of her book Saturday at the restaurant, which is the only Cape Girardeau location selling it.

She scored a coup when she acquired the recipe for the famous "throwed rolls" made at Lambert's restaurant in Sikeston.

"I didn't think they'd give it to me," she said.

Of course, Lambert's baked 2,246,400 rolls last year so the recipe starts with 18 pounds of all-purpose flour. But Holtzhouser has adapted Lambert's version for a 36-roll batch.

The book also provides histories of the restaurants.

Holtzhouser resigned from the Chamber of Commerce job after 10 years because she wanted to devote herself to promoting the book. Already she has been hired to teach cooking schools in Memphis and St. Louis.

Nearly 2,000 copies of the book have been sold seven weeks after publication, which already surpasses Holtzhouser's expectations.

But she wrote the book because her memories associate cooking with "warmth and joy. I still remember the sound of all the women laughing as a big meal would be prepared," she said.

When others read her book and her memories, she hopes "their own come in and sit on their other shoulder."