Food on the Farm: One Kansas Farm Woman's Cooking

Wilma Counts kept two manuscript cookbooks during her life that reflect at least part of her cooking style; the rest of her cooking style is merely oral history. She was an atypical farm wife in that she had a college education. In many other aspects Wilma was not so unusual for her time; thus, her cooking practices serve as a valuable case study for researchers of twentieth-century food history. This paper tries to capture what she cooked as reflected in her cookbooks and as it changed over the years.