A Star is Born

How a freelance artist & stay-at-home-mom turned cooking into a career

Welcome to Cook & Tell, a foodletter about cooking, family and life on a Maine island.

Almost half a century ago, my mom, Karyl Bannister, started writing Cook & Tell as a weekly column in the local newspaper. A few years later, she launched a monthly cooking newsletter by the same name which she wrote, illustrated and published for thirty-plus years, working her way into the hearts and kitchens of thousands of home, hobby and professional cooks all over the world.

Although she passed away last year, I’m keeping her spirit alive by reviving her newsletter in small bites, with excerpts from the archives and occasional “orts” from me, all with recipes and sketches tossed in for good measure.

In Karyl’s words:

The seeds for my newsletter were planted a week before my wedding. It had dawned on my mother, although not on me, that I was embarking on a major enterprise with a serious deficiency. I had no three-by-five card file of recipes, not a single family favorite committed to memory, and not even a scintilla of interest in cooking. In a week, I’d be married, I kept telling her, and cooked food would just happen.

I took her Joy of Cooking on my honeymoon and read it on the long drive from Massachusetts to Texas. As the years passed, I began to embrace cooking as a hobby and a craft, not just a survival skill. I like to talk. I like to meet people, and I wanted to know what they were cooking.

Then, at 40, I was suddenly single. I needed a job to bring in some shekels and to assure me I was of value to somebody besides my dog and my daughter, so I talked the local weekly into giving me a food column that was part day-in-the-life, part recipes.

Each column would include a recipe that would correlate with the “story,” however tenuous the connection. Whether this would be possible remained to be seen. But I was cocky, borderline impertinent, and whistling in the dark about almost everything in that transitional time of my life. I was noticing puddles and rainbows more keenly than before. My home, my friends, and my neighborhood had taken on new significance. I had the feeling that endless subject matter was out there to plug into and turn into writing–and, I hoped, reading–matter. 

My first column appeared in the Boothbay Register on July 1, 1976. I was off and running. 

Soon after, I decided to cast a wider net, to find out what was cooking outside my neighborhood—to people like me, who enjoyed relaxed, foodie conversations and ideas they could latch onto immediately, without being made to feel dysfunctional for not using cilantro. Thus, what began as a weekly column grew into the monthly newsletter, Cook & Tell.

It’s a long way from my mother’s kitchen. She gave me the nudge I needed to discover what fun it is to cook. Through thirty-some years and nearly four hundred issues of my newsletter, subscribers have helped me pass the nudge along.

Karyl’s Headnotes

The summer Amie was born, I packed her up and trundled off to my mother’s for six weeks of grandmothering. It was blackberry time and the vines in Mother’s back acres were heavy with the fruit. We had a blackberry pie almost every day and dredged up all sorts of friends to help us eat them. At the end of those six weeks, I may not have mastered motherhood, but I sure knew what was up when it came to pie.

MOTHER’S PEACH PIE

A good choice for winter baking when fresh peaches are scarce

• Unbaked 9” pie shell (pastry for 2-crust pie)

• 2 15-oz. cans Del Monte sliced yellow cling peaches in 100% juice

• ¾ c. dark brown sugar, firmly packed

• 1/3 c. butter

• ½ c. corn syrup

• 2 t. lemon juice

• 1 t. almond extract

• 1-2 T. cream

Drain peaches thoroughly and pat dry with paper towels. Arrange peach slices in pie shell. Cook and stir everything else except the almond extract, bring to boil, simmer until it thickens. Cool, add almond extract, and pour over peaches. Place lattice strips of pastry over top. Brush with cream, sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 450 for 10 min, 350 for 35-45 mins or til brown.

Amie’s Endnotes

I have no memory of those blackberry pie days at Granny’s, but I do remember Mom showing me how to make this peach pie; how weaving lattice was like braiding my hair; how brushing the top with cream instead of plain milk makes it so much richer. I was in fourth grade, on Christmas break, a light dusting of snow was falling, and there we were in that tiny kitchen with barely enough room to stand side-by-side and roll out the dough.