Culinary writer/researcher preserves Arkansas food ways
Arkansas food researcher and writer Kat Robinson has a million stories to tell, about 500 old cookbooks, and countless documented recollections to back those stories up, and they’re all about food. Arkansas food, to be exact, and some of it local.
The two most recent of her 11 books, Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State, and Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats are culinary testaments to the character of Arkansas food and some of the characters who create it – one book serving up retro dishes and the other, also the subject of a PBS documentary, plating up a page-turning portion of fun nostalgia about every Dairy Bar in Arkansas, including Garner’s Drive-In in Berryville.
We caught up with Kat at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow on February 19 during a five-hour workshop where she and guests were making fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, mashed potatoes, squash casserole and lemon chess pie based on recipes in Arkansas Cookery.
During breaks, Kat shared Arkansas cooking history, tips and a few personal adventures.
She had arrived at WCDH a week earlier with 2000 frozen mini Coca-Cola cakes she had to ice for her booth at the Eureka Springs Chocolate Festival. Yes, two thousand.
Being an exhibitor was a new experience for Kat, who was a chocolate contest judge at the festival between 2010 and 2014.
“It took three days to bake that many!” Kat told her workshop guests. “I froze and transported them here and iced them with the Coca-Cola chocolate frosting. I’ve never made quite so many in my life!
“You know, the Writers’ Colony is the only place in the United States with a full kitchen for culinary writers. I’m so thankful because I had those little cakes spread over every inch of the kitchen, some stacked on trays with waxed paper between. I love staying here. Every time I have, I’ve come out with something productive.”
But Kat didn’t start out as a food writer.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer; I’ve written my entire life – out of college I wrote news scripts for KAIT-TV and then THV. I left TV in 2007 to strike out on my own in public relations. After an article I wrote for my website took off in December 2007, I decided to focus on food and tourism. The idea was I’d never starve,” Kat quipped.
She was approached in 2012 by History Press about writing a book featuring pies. Her food writing career began that year when Arkansas Pie: A Delicious Slice of The Natural State was published after a mind-bending tasting trip across Arkansas with a plastic fork and a big cooler.
Kat explained it was only her “one bite rule” that kept her from overloading on sugar. “I’d get the pie to go and take just one bite and put the rest in the cooler,” Kat explained. “The only thing I ate on that entire trip was pie and the beef jerky and V8 juice I carried with me.”
In 2018, four Arkansas food books later, she did it again with Another Slice of Arkansas Pie; and this time Local Flavor’s pecan pie landed on the cover.
“It was just perfect for the cover -–a beautiful slice, well presented, with the light from a perfect snow-covered day,” Kat said. “It’s not the only one. There’s also the huckleberry fried pie at The Balcony Restaurant, the peanut butter pie at Mud Street Café, possum pie at Myrtie Mae’s, blackberry fried pie at Rockin’ Pig Saloon, and the pies at the Sweet and Savory.”
In all, she tasted 300 pies on the way from Little Rock to Hot Springs and Texarkana to West Memphis and back by way of Hope and Malvern. Only one time on her pie pilgrimage did she break her one bite rule. It happened in Harrisburg when a taste of the strawberry cream pie at Gavin’s Downtown dissolved her resolve. “It was the only time I ate the whole piece,” Kat claimed.
Kat does her own photography, and in the case of the Dairy Bars book, most of the food was staged on her 2011 Honda CRV dashboard, with the dairy bar visible through her windshield. Only one time did it all slide off in her lap, and that was a mess o’ catfish; but she had managed to get the shot a second before.
Although it is her main interest, Arkansas food isn’t the only cuisine to catch Kat’s attention.
“I’ve been a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism for more than thirty years. Within the organization, I’ve done a lot of food research and conducted some fifteen feasts covering a variety of cultures from all sorts of European meals from Italy, France, England and Germany, to Asian meals of the time from the Mughal Empire (now India) and pre-Edo Japan. But I’m a cook, not a chef. I find food research absolutely fascinating, and when I started researching Arkansas food, the work neatly dovetailed with the research I’d already conducted.”
Meanwhile her collection of 500 mid-20th century Arkansas cookbooks continues to grow as she researches and works toward a grant to archive and preserve the unique history of Arkansas food. Anyone who has a cookbook printed before 2000 who would like to donate it can email her at kat@tiedyetravels.com.
“Most of the cookbooks dating back to the ‘50s, ‘40s and ‘30s have no pictures and sometimes the ingredients are misprinted or out of order,” she said. “I’ve made them workable and made as many as 106 recipes for Arkansas Cookery, just so I can include a picture of what the dishes look like when they’re made.
“This is history, this is heritage, this is to preserve what our life was like. When was the last time you used clarified milk or made tallerine? Early on there were no electric blenders, no microwaves, no food processors. This is what Arkansas cooking came out of and the beginning of the story about how it became what it is today.”
If not for her research and posts on tiedyetravels.com and Tie Dye Travels on Facebook, many people would never know that a woman in Searcy invented chicken nuggets; or that brown & serve rolls, cheese dip, fried pickles and chocolate gravy were invented in Arkansas. Kat knows how it happened, exactly who did it, and why. All those quirky stories and a list of books plus a ton of information are on her website to enjoy.
Who knew cheese dip was invented in Hot Springs?