Blog Archives

Mushroom Soup and Other Indispensable Ingredients

3/20/2017

(Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)

Though Mother was the author of several cookbooks, she never taught any of us to cook. She had her hands full as a widowed working mother raising three children, so there just wasn’t time.

Like many of our mothers during that era of convenience cooking, my mother liked to use condensed mushroom soup to fancy up a recipe. Lowly chicken thighs---which, in my grandmother’s house, were politely called “second joints” ----were miraculously converted into fine cuisine with the simple addition of a can of mushroom soup.

When I graduated from college, I needed to know how to cook something, anything, that was guest-worthy. Visiting Mother in Selma one weekend, I told her I needed a simple recipe that was failproof. She reached for her reporter’s notebook and wrote detailed instructions for Butterbean Casserole.

My favorite part of the recipe, besides the fact that it’s in her handwriting, is the encouraging little note at the end.

Maybe I’ll make some tonight….

10 Comments

Buzzards

3/10/2017

22 Comments

(Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)

Mother loved to collect Southern superstitions. She even wrote and illustrated a little book called Count Those Buzzards! Stamp Those Gray Mules! I think it’s now long out of print, but it was a great collection of superstitions from the South.

Counting buzzards was one thing Mother believed in doing. An old regional rhyme says the number of buzzards you see can predict your future. It goes:

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
And four for a boy.
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for secrets never been told…

If Mother saw only one buzzard, I swear she would pull the car over to the side of the road until another buzzard appeared.

Mother used to talk about the buzzard rhyme in her storytelling sessions. People were intrigued, and she often got correspondence from folks telling her about their buzzard-counting experiences. One of her favorite letters came from a woman in Tennessee who wrote:

Dear Kathryn,
Every time I see a buzzard, I think of you.

22 Comments

Photo Courtesy of Ted Tucker

"Some people are important to intellectuals, journalists, or politicians, but Kathryn Tucker Windham is probably the only person I know in Alabama who is important to everybody."

–Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University.