Treasured Recipes compiled by the National Knife Collectors Association and National Knife Museum 1997
This was part of a lot of other books I found on eBay for a reasonable price and honestly, I was delighted to get it. The cover alone! An aerial shot of apparently the museum is a bold choice. Good for them for not going for the obvious knife or food picture. As the mission statement says, the organization and museum’s goal is to educate the public about the importance of cutlery and to galvanize national interest in knife appreciation and collection.
As far as I can tell the museum was in the mezzanine of the Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville, Tennessee, and has since been divided up. Sliced up, if you will.
The recipes really are from all over the United States so I wouldn’t consider it a Tennessee cookbook even though that is where the museum seemed to have been in 1997. The contributors are listed by name and location.
There is a wide variety of recipes including a surprising number of bean recipes (I kept picturing the book as being made up of recipes that required a lot of cutting but it does not) from dips to soups to salads. Some of the recipes are a little perplexing like Judy Cohan (Oak Ridge, TN)’s dirty rice which calls for a can of fried onion rings, rice, butter, and water and nothing else that one normally sees in dirty rice (liver, peppers, fresh ingredients) or Penny Weaver (Brookville, OH)’s Winter Carnival Casserole which calls for 1/2 cup of corn syrup, canned tomatoes, ground beef, macaroni, cheddar, and green peppers. Judy Cohan also contributed the interestingly titled “Six Week Muffins” which calls for 5 cups of Raisin Bran. Bold choices all around.
Some of the recipes have cute little asides or notes hidden in the directions like the tip that you can bake the muffins in the same time as the coffee is perking.