Come On Into the Kitchen: Iowa Radio Days : Cookbooks: The recipes in ‘Neighboring on the Air’ are for fearless eaters. But never mind; the real story is the women who have doled out advice via radio in Iowa.

“This is a cookbook,” Evelyn Birkby announces in the preface of “Neighboring on the Air: Cooking With the KMA Radio Homemakers” (University of Iowa: paperback, $14.95).

Um hmm, and the recipes aren’t for culinary sissies. Six-layer washday dinner, escalloped cabbage, hay-hand rolls, egg yolk cookies, Lucile’s remarkable fudge and Susan Christensen’s grandmother’s gooey popcorn are for fearless Midwestern eaters. Even Doris Murphy’s rhubarb dessert without sugar calls for 20 marshmallows, a batch of vanilla wafers and a cup of whipped cream.

But never mind. “This is a story book,” Birkby soon informs us. And so it is. The recipes simply punctuate a 65-year history of women who have doled out advice and offered companionship on KMA radio in Shenandoah, Iowa.

Vintage photographs flesh out the text. And there are some beauties of the homemakers: Bernice Currier showing off her “modern conveniences of the 1940s”; a busload of women from Galt, Mo., who traveled to Shenandoah to visit Leanna Driftmier; Edith Hansen with the 30,000 greeting cards she received from her fans on her 49th birthday. KMA’s grandiose building is here, too. This Moorish-style palace, complete with turrets, houses a 1,000-seat auditorium with a star-studded ceiling.

“This is also a trip back into my own past,” Birkby--herself a radio homemaker--finally confesses, “for I knew most of the people in this book.”

Me, too. A daughter of KMA engineer Walter Ely, I grew up in Shenandoah, steeped in radio culture. My mother, Erva Nell Liston Ely, did not have a microphone and amplifier installed in her kitchen, but our Summit Avenue neighbors Adella Shoemaker and Leanna Driftmier did. So did our friend Edythe Stirlen, the Little Minister who broadcast daily religious programs from her home on 6th Avenue.

Nearly everything was broadcast in this town of 7,000 in southwestern Iowa. I thought that was quite normal until I moved to Los Angeles in the late ‘50s. Then I learned that every little girl who plays the flute does not perform on radio or have her picture on the cover of the KMA Guide when she starts kindergarten, recovers from polio and attends Christmas parties with the KMA Kiddies. I also learned that having a dad who built radio stations, kept them running and worked overtime as fix-it man to an entire town was unusual. And, of course, not every small town can claim to be the home of the Everly Brothers and a host of lesser entertainers.

But that’s my trip back. Birkby’s journey drives home the point that every small town did not spawn well-educated, neighborly homemakers who became media stars. These women “developed and maintained a tradition of women broadcasters unknown anywhere else in the world of radio,” she writes.

KMA has a strong signal that can be heard in much of Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas. In addition, some of the homemakers had syndicated programs picked up by as many as 90 stations across the country. Those homey programs have died off, but women haven’t left KMA. Today Susan Christensen is general manager of the station and Susan Cochran is associate news director.

The source of this phenomenon was Shenandoah’s nursery business. Looking for a means of publicizing their products, enterprising nurserymen hit upon radio as the answer. One of the most successful was Earl May, who married Gertrude Welch, a nurseryman’s daughter, and in 1919 founded the May Seed Co. in Shenandoah. Six years later he launched KMA and pressed Gertrude into service as a singer.

There was lots of air time to fill with live programs on agricultural and home arts, as well as news, religion and entertainment. Homemakers rose to the occasion by sharing their recipes--for food as well as hand lotion and soap--offering housekeeping tips, chatting about their families and reading letters from listeners. In time, they became stars of the airwaves who could attract crowds to public events.

And why not? The homemakers had large supplies of useful information and common sense. Most of them had earned college degrees--often in journalism or home economics, but their number included musicians and teachers, too. All of the women cultivated an easy way of “visiting” over the radio. When a neighbor came to call during a broadcast or family members wandered into the kitchen, they were on the air.

Listeners felt as if they knew these friendly women; those who were isolated on farms particularly valued the sense of family and community that arrived over the airwaves. The news wasn’t all good, but the homemakers’ reports of the deaths and divorces, war injuries and natural disasters in their own families probably made them more real to their audience.

Birkby writes of a sense of community and trust that is all too rare for residents of modern cities. My friends who have stayed in Shenandoah sometimes complain about their inability to have private lives, and so would I, but the message of this book is that we haven’t only smartened up and slimmed down our cooking, we have lost a profound sense of neighborliness.

That’s why it comes as a shock to read, in a postscript, that the homemakers “give women a sense of worth and identity in a society that frequently gives them neither.” The observation is true enough, but it is not the logical conclusion of Birkby’s book. Although she cites a couple of examples of discrimination against women and makes it clear that the radio homemakers’ lives could be hard, she portrays a chapter of rural life that will strike most readers as idyllic.

I think I’ll go whip up a batch of Edith Hansen’s Shenandoah White Cake.

Cream together: 2/3 cup vegetable shortening or butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon each vanilla and almond flavoring. Sift together: 3 cups cake flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 3 teaspoons baking powder. Add sifted ingredients alternately with 1 cup milk. Beat 3/4 cup egg whites, add 1 cup sugar, beat until stiff, and fold into the above. Bake in wax paper-lined pan (no grease) for 30 minutes in 350-degree oven.

All recipes are from “Neighboring on the Air: Cooking With the KMA Radio Homemakers . “

JESSIE YOUNG’S VARNISHED CHICKEN

1 chicken, cut up

1 envelope dry onion soup mix

1/2 cup catsup

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1/2 cup water

Place chicken pieces in single layer in large baking pan. Combine onion soup mix, catsup, brown sugar and water and pour over chicken.

Cover with foil. Bake at 300 degrees 20 minutes. Uncover and bake 20 minutes longer or until chicken is done. Makes 4 servings.

This is a wonderful old-fashioned raisin-oatmeal cookie despite its strange name.

BERNICE CURRIER’S “SLUGS”

1 cup butter

3/4 cup margarine

4 cups rolled oats

2 cups raisins

Water or 2/3 cup milk

4 eggs

2 cups sugar

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

4 cups sifted flour

Melt butter and margarine in large skillet. Stir in rolled oats and toast over moderate heat, stirring, about 10 minutes, or until lightly browned. Set aside.

Cover raisins with water and cook to rolling boil. Remove from heat and cool. Drain liquid from raisins (should have 2/3 cup raisin water or use milk) and reserve both.

Combine eggs, sugar and raisin water and mix well. Combine oats with baking soda, baking powder and flour and stir into egg mixture. Add drained raisins. Drop by teaspoons onto greased baking sheets. Bake at 375 degrees 10 minutes or until done.

EDITH HANSEN’S SEATTLE LUNCH

1 pound ground beef

1 large onion, finely chopped

Oil

1/2 pound shredded Cheddar cheese

1 green pepper, diced

1 (8-ounce) can whole kernel corn, drained

1 (8-ounce) can mushrooms and liquid

1 (10 3/4-ounce) can condensed tomato soup

1/2 pound spaghetti, cooked and drained

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Salt, pepper

Buttered bread crumbs

Brown ground beef and onion in little oil in skillet. Drain off fat. Combine with cheese, green pepper, corn, mushrooms and liquid, tomato soup, spaghetti and Worcestershire. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Spoon into greased casserole and top with buttered bread crumbs as desired. Bake at 350 degrees 1 hour. Makes 6 servings.

ADELLA’S SODA CRACKER PIE

3 egg whites

1 cup sugar

14 square soda crackers

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1 teaspoon vanilla

Sliced fresh or canned peaches

1 cup whipping cream, whipped, sweetened or prepared whipped topping

Beat egg whites in bowl until soft peaks form. Gradually add sugar, beating until stiff.

Roll soda crackers into fine crumbs. Fold into egg whites. Fold in baking powder, pecans and vanilla. Spoon into buttered 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 325 degrees 30 minutes. Cool.

Top with thin layer fresh or well-drained canned sliced peaches. Cover with layer of whipped cream. Refrigerate overnight. Makes 8 to 10 servings.

Note: Pie is much improved by refrigerating.