Hargrove's

Good morning.

I am inspired to write today thanks to a friend of my baby sister no. 5, who blogged about purchasing her first cookbook when she was in high school, in 1963 or so, at Hargrove's in Brownsville, Texas.

I too am a cookbook collector and I too bought my first cookbook at Hargrove's.  It was in circa 1947 and I didnt start really cooking from it until 1949.  But I remember the first meal I cooked.  I was in high school, and I threw a tantrum and wouldn't come down to dinner.  When hunger pangs finally calmed my seething brain, I came down to a clean quiet kitchen, and my mother said that if I wanted something to eat I could cook it myself.  The ingredients were right there, simple hamburger meat, and vegetables, and all I had to do was cook and clean up.  So I did.  What a revelation it was to find my results nearly inedible to my discriminating tongue, raised as it was to my mother's delicious meals.  So--at some point later on I bought a cookbook.  My first cookbook was Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook and I was very fond of it.  I read it continually, like a novel.  "Breslin Baked Bluefish,"  "Cigarettes a la Prince Henry," and that modern-day staple in its pristine form: Spaghetti Alfredo which was then not the disgusting commercial white-sauce and fat concoction it now is, but a fabulous mixture of butter and cream.

There weren't many cultural amenities in Brownsville in those days, that I was aware of. The library was in a state of morbidity. But in the back of Hargrove's Stationery store, there were some shelves...and the Hargrove's had books there. New, beautiful books, lots of them (to my eyes) and they were all for sale and they were wonderful.

The cookbook was the first book I bought at Hargrove's, but it was the first of several. I bought many children's books there when I was teaching because there were no classroom libraries in our impoverished schools.  I bought my first ghost story book and just scared myself to pieces reading those incredibly well written classics by M.R.James, Walter de la Mare, and others.

Thank God for Hargrove's.  It was a little jewel of culture in a cultureless wasteland.  I'm not saying that Brownsville had no culture. It had more than that, it had a treasure which the new generation of citizens seems to have found out.  But then, things were just rocking along  in the wake of the Second World War, and the Mexicans were the Mexicans, and the Americans were the Americans, and civic responsibility seemed to have gotten lost somewhere in the mix.  Things seem to be better now, but what do I know? I haven't been there for some time. YAZZYBEL