McClanahan's Recipe Swap celebrates 25 years

Saturday, Dec. 2, marks the 25th anniversary of Susan McClanahan writing the food column "Recipe Swap" in the Southeast Missourian.

McClanahan said the original plan for the column was for readers to have a place to swap recipes back and forth.

"The idea was people could write in requests for a recipe and then we would put that request out and then people could respond," McClanahan said. "That lasted a little while, but we never got as much swapping as we hoped, so I just started listing recipes I liked."

Thousands of recipes and 25 years later, McClanahan is still going strong.

"It's been fun, and it sure doesn't seem like 25 years," McClanahan said.

McClanahan said she started cooking when she was in the second grade to help out while the rest of her family was at work.

"I am the youngest of six children and we grew up on our family farm just across the river outside of McClure, Illinois," McClanahan said. "My mom was the seamstress for Rust & Martin bridal salon, and she would get lunch started and then tell me how to finish it."

McClanahan said she took every home economics class she could in high school and then graduated from Southeast Missouri State University with a degree in food nutrition.

Years later she was approached by a friend who worked for the Missourian who asked whether McClanahan would be interested in writing a recipe column for the paper.

"I said I'm a home-ec major not a Journalism major, but I'll give it a try," McClanahan said. "I thought I'd do it for a while and see how it went but here it is 25 years later."

McClanahan said the process of writing and filing the articles was a lot different when she first started.

"There was no internet 25 years ago, so I was pulling recipes from books," McClanahan said. "I couldn't just email them in after I typed them up at home, I had to save them on a floppy disk and drive them to the newspaper's office so they could download it onto their computers."

McClanahan said she found an ebb and flow in food trends over the last 25 years.

Recipes become really popular and everybody's talking about it and everybody's making it," McClanahan said. "Things like Amish Friendship Bread. For a while everybody had the starter in their cabinet, and they were feeding it every day and you know making Amish friendship bread and then that kind of died down."

McClanahan said one of her favorite columns of the year is her big Christmas cookie column that she puts out the first week of December.

"A lot of people look forward to that," McClanahan said. "I've already had people stop me in the store and say, 'I'm looking forward to the cookie column.'"

McClanahan said two things that haven't changed in 25 years is that her picture above her name is the same as the first article she wrote, and she is still paid the same weekly rate.

"But I don't do it for the money and I'm here to stay until they tell me they're tired of me," McClanahan said. "I have met the most wonderful people and I've made friends through the column that I wouldn't have met otherwise. And, of course, I love to cook and talk about cooking, so, it's been wonderful."