Contains historical facts and conjectures!

This is why you should avoid committee meetings:

I showed up at a committee meeting for my church last spring.  “Gee,” said the chair, “it would be great if we published a cookbook.  Katharine, would you be interested in taking it on?”

Actually, I was and am interested.  I assembled a formidable committee; we’re making great strides.  The problem is that we know that most people who want recipes look on the internet.  Who needs another cookbook?

So we decided to intersperse lots of commentary among the recipes.  We also decided that focusing on the community might make the book appeal to more buyers than those within our church.

I started assembling the commentary, a decade-by-decade retrospective of cooking in Summit, New Jersey, over the last hundred years.  Now I find that because I’ve begun the task, no one else is inclined to take it over.

Historical research is more difficult than I thought.  You find snippets here and there.  You try to knit them together, even if the connection is tenuous.  Then you find another nubbin that throws off your entire storyline.  Or you find that you have far too much information about one era, so much that it makes the other sections look scant.

Clearly, you then have to discard some of the information.  But what?

I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I never dreamed that it would be one so far out of my field.  Wish me luck, please.