Radio Homemakers : BOOK REVIEW : Meanwhile, Back on the Farm : Up a Country Lane Cookbook <i> By Evelyn Birkby (University of Iowa Press: $22.95, 1993)</i>

When I lived in Iowa during graduate school, my friend Alan would bring me pheasants to cook. Never having eaten or cooked pheasant while growing up in California, I went through cookbooks looking for recipes.

Luckily, I found the section on game in “James Beard’s American Cooking.” Because Alan skinned--rather than plucked--the pheasants, I learned to drape bacon over the breasts or wrap the birds in butter-soaked cheesecloth to keep them from drying out while roasting. I tried various sauces; our favorite was a light cream sauce with a few drops of good brandy.

Pheasant, I discovered, was delicious--how could you go wrong with such beautiful, corn-fed birds? Still, I felt insecure, a greenhorn whose only knowledge came from books, so I consulted with some friends who, like Alan, had grown up on Iowa farms. (Hunting was more than a sport in their families--it helped stock the freezer for winter.)

The couple I talked to had never heard of the techniques I’d learned from Beard and other cookbooks. No, no, no, they said, such methods didn’t sound right at all. If we provided the pheasant, they promised, they would show me how it was really done.

We set a date. Early that morning, Alan and I went hunting and brought down two birds. We showed up as planned. The man cut the pheasants into parts, the woman placed them in a pan and covered them with a mixture of Campbell’s cream of celery soup, Lipton’s dried onion soup and dots of butter. Into the oven and, an hour and a half later, spooned onto minute rice, those beautiful corn-fed birds tasted exactly like something out of a can.

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I recalled this story recently while reading Evelyn Birkby’s “Up a Country Lane Cookbook,” a memoir-with-recipes of the four years (1950 to 1954) Birkby and her husband Robert and their two young children lived on Cottonwood Farm, two miles from the tiny southwest Iowa town of Farragut.

I remembered the story partly because Birkby is a storyteller and, like all good storytellers, she calls up our own stories in response. But mostly, Birkby’s recipes recalled that characteristic Midwestern blend of local bounty (freshly harvested vegetables, corn-fed meat) and convenience food (canned soups, Jell-O, marshmallows, etc.).

I would never buy this book for the recipes alone, except that in Birkby’s hands, every recipe tells a story--and the story is invariably more delectable than the dish.

An earlier Birkby cookbook, “Neighboring on the Air: Cooking With the KMA Radio Homemakers” (University of Iowa Press: 1991), was a series of recipe-studded profiles of women broadcasters who kept a generation of farm wives company over the airwaves. Birkby herself was a KMA radio broadcaster and a newspaper columnist. For 43 years, she wrote an anecdotal recipe column for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel that also was entitled “Up a Country Lane.”

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Each chapter in the book “Up a Country Lane” is based on an aspect of farm life--chickens, water, laundry, schools, planting, storms, Sunday fun, etc. How Birkby chose and grouped recipes for each topic is quirky and frequently amusing. Because wash day was strenuous, recipes following the chapter on “Laundry” are for simple meals: soup and corn bread, shepherd’s pie, quick-and-easy hash. “Saturday Night in Town” gives recipes from Farragut’s one cafe, the Anchor Inn, for fried chicken and liver and onions, and a cookie recipe (grocery bars) from Delbert Robert, a Farragut grocer. Because Birkby’s favorite use of well water was for tea, the chapter on “Water” gives recipes for the scones and gingerbread she served at tea parties, as well as recipes for fish.

Throughout the book, Birkby paints a picture of farm life that was vanishing even as she and her husband tried to make a go of it. They had rented 120 acres and a farmhouse with primitive plumbing. The only running water in the house was the kitchen tap.

Birkby, city-raised and college-educated, was more dismayed by the difficulty of tending the necessary vegetable garden. “I felt woefully inadequate,” she writes. She told her husband: “Our neighbors must have been born with hoes in their hands. . . . I’ll learn how to cook and can the food, but I’m resigning as a gardener.” The garden, she imagines, “gave a sigh of relief.”

Birkby casts a kindly but keen eye on the habits and customs of those bygone times. She writes how rural society divided itself into various allegiances: by ethnicity, by church, by school district, by social club, even by “beef club.”

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What is a beef club? Well, before electricity (and, therefore, refrigeration) was generally available, butchering a steer in the heat of summer posed a major storage problem for Midwestern farm families. Neighbors got together, and each family unit donated one steer per year to the entire group. During the summer months, a steer was butchered weekly--in the Birkbys’ club, every Wednesday--and the meat distributed among members. Farmers competed among themselves to raise the best beef, so that well into the ‘50’s, even after most households had refrigerators, beef clubs thrived because the meat was so delicious.

A few folk fit into no clubs; the mysterious Japanese men, for example, who appeared each spring to sex chicks at the hatcheries. “We didn’t know much about where they stayed or what they did in their spare time,” Birkby writes. “In fact, socializing with anyone very different was not part of most rural Iowans’ daily lives.”

The book is also liberally seasoned with bits of country color and lore. In her grandmother’s day, Birkby tells us, an invitation for dinner might be phrased, “Come over and we’ll kill a chicken.” An outhouse, she tells us, was often called a “necessity.” Eavesdropping on a party line was “rubbering.”

Farmers predicted a winter’s harshness by looking at the thickness of a hog’s skin at butchering, or the thickness of the rings of an onion: the thicker the skin or rings, the colder the winter was to be. Iowa farm wives washed clothes on Monday and ironed on Tuesday. “No one,” writes Birkby, “could tell me why. . . .”

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Birkby’s humor is understated, sly and compassionate. She writes fondly of Myrtle Brooks, who could not resist a ringing telephone, never mind that there were party-line rules against “rubbering”: “No matter whom a call was intended for, when the phone rang, everyone knew that Myrtle would be listening.” Myrtle, Birkby writes, was “more up-to-date than the newspaper, more accurate than the radio newscasters, and more aware of the concerns and joys of the people on her telephone line than any other resident of the area.”

Myrtle sent out the word when a farmer needed help, or a doctor was required. Once, as Birkby was giving a bread recipe to a friend, Myrtle broke in and begged them to wait so she could get the recipe too. She’d been in the tub when the phone rang, was standing there naked and dripping in the dark without a pencil. With remarkable forbearance, Birkby and her friend chatted calmly while Myrtle pulled herself together. The next day, Myrtle returned the favor by giving Birkby her famous secret recipe for banana cake. The recipe, of course, follows.

Newspaper ads for Maytag washers and Bell Telephone, printed bills for machinery sales and photos from the family album illustrate Birkby’s text. A snapshot of Birkby’s Friendly Fairview social club shows 10 stout farm women in flowery house dresses and sensible shoes and suggests what hard work and rich, starchy, protein-focused meals can do to a woman. There are also snapshots of neighbors, a hog named Newcomer, a cow-herding farm dog named Sparkle, various men driving farm equipment and, of course, the Birkby children, Bob and Dulcie Jean.

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This may be a cookbook, but the reader grows close to these people who work so hard, then gather together in school houses and churches, at social clubs and cafes, at each other’s farms for harvests and auctions. The chapter on “Storms” touches on many of life’s difficulties, and Iowa farm life in the ‘50s was rife with them: A neighbor’s home is destroyed by a tornado. Another neighbor is killed when his tractor rolls into a ditch and crushes him. Another dies after heart surgery. Dulcie Jean, Birkby’s 5-year-old daughter, dies suddenly of a mysterious heart virus. “We learned, during those long, painful days,” Birkby writes, “that the quiet offer of food provided sustenance for our bodies and comfort for our aching hearts, as our family weathered the terrible storm of our daughter’s death.” At the end of the chapter she includes a recipe for Mabel Lewis’ comfort Jell-O (red gelatin with pineapple and grapes with whipped topping). “This,” Birkby writes, “was truly a comfort salad, for Mabel always took this to a family at the time of serious problems.”

Robert and Evelyn Birkby didn’t make it as farmers. By the early 1950s, 120 acres of farmland could no longer support a family of four. (Indeed, today it takes 600 acres.) In 1954, Robert accepted a job with the County Agricultural Service, and the family moved to the town of Sidney, where Evelyn prospered as a journalist and their house had (“oh joy!”) a real bathroom.

As for Cottonwood Farm? “Our house at Cottonwood Farm is gone,” Birkby writes, “. . . and so is the barn and all the other buildings except a small machine shed. Even the cottonwood trees have been cut down and the brooks from the springs dammed to make way for more rows of soybeans and corn.”