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| Look for Good Food, Simply Prepared in this summer's Yankee Magazine in their round-up of cookbooks!
Download tip sheet as PDF file View tip sheet in Rich Text Format Download Author Q&A as PDF file Download Press Release as PDF file Download Full Press Kit as PDF file
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April 8, 2006 Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA): In the News! April 28, 2006 Exeter News-Letter "Good Food, Simply Prepared," a cookbook by Joan Styrna, a culinary arts teacher at Timberlane High School, captures the tastes of authentic Eastern Europe. The cookbook started as a collection of family recipes gathered when her parents came to live with her in Brentwood a few years ago. When your neighbor says she's making sausage for dinner, you know she means she's frying up some links from the supermarket. Unless your neighbor happens to be Joan Styrna. When Styrna says she's making sausage for dinner, she means she's grinding the meat, adding the seasonings and stuffing the casings herself. Why? "I like sausage, but not store-bought. I want to know what's in it." Until recently, "Good food, simply prepared" was Styrna's motto. Now, that motto is also the title of her newly published cookbook. Styrna never really meant to write a cookbook. But when her elderly parents, Anne and Stanley Styrna, came to live with her a few years ago, she began thinking more about the family recipes she had enjoyed through the years and how they linked her to her Eastern European heritage. As she watched her mother cooking, she began to jot the recipes in a blank cookbook she'd received as a gift, aware that her parents were the last of their generation, and that their good food, simply prepared, was the last of a culinary era. She encouraged them to make all of the old family favorites, while she took note. Of the cookbook Styrna says, "This is a project I did with my parents. I will have it for the rest of my life." Styrna is a Brentwood resident and culinary arts teacher at Timberlane High School, who trained as a chef at Madeleine Kamman's Modern Gourmet Boston, the San Francisco Culinary Academy and the Culinary Institute of America. Though she'd been an eager cook since childhood, Styrna earned her first cooking stripes at the Old Mill restaurant in Westminster, Mass., then taught cooking at a junior high school in Massachusetts after graduating with a degree in home economics from Keene State College. In 1980, a teacher lay-off prompted Styrna to head to the West Coast. There she took a cooking position in the executive dining room of the computer company Atari. She cooked for celebrities such as San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, footballer Joe Montana, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Judy Collins and Peter Graves. "I felt like I had arrived, preparing dinner for such well-known people," she says. But homesick after four years, she headed back to New England and began developing the culinary arts program at Timberlane. Styrna is passionate about food and cooking, insisting on high-quality ingredients, locally grown when possible and always made from scratch. She and her father pick native blueberries in Maine each summer, preserving them into jam on an old woodstove. She cans or freezes just about everything, from sweet corn stripped from its ears just after picking, to tomatoes, pickles and even horseradish. At a reading at the Bartlett Memorial Library in Brentwood a few days before Easter, Styrna prepared a traditional Easter breakfast for attendees: Lithuanian Pierogi bread, studded with golden raisins and "slathered" with butter served along with hard-boiled eggs and hand-grated horseradish. The eggs had been dyed the old-fashioned way, in a bath of onion skins, which stained the eggs a burnished red-brown. She also taught a traditional Easter game, egg fighting, in which the boiled eggs are hit against each other, the winner being the holder of the egg that doesn't crack. Such simple pleasures and friendly food are a hallmark of Styrna's style, which resonates throughout her cookbook. Each chapter begins with a story from Styrna's history, going back to her immigrant grandparents who settled in Nashua at the turn of the century. It is her grandfather's woodstove that she still takes great satisfaction cooking on and recommends to her readers as an appliance worth using. A pen-and-ink drawing of that stove decorates the corner of each page of the cookbook, and she even offers tips for woodstove cooking. All the recipes have been carefully tested for modern kitchens, however. Styrna gives a bit of family history with each recipe, along with some helpful hints. She even includes comments from friends who have served as taste-testers. Styrna's engaging personality is as satisfying as her recipes, and is as much a part of the cookbook as the meals she presents in it. She was recently featured on an episode of New Hampshire Chronicle along with her parents, who, she proudly confesses, "stole the show." Her recipes range from old-timers like sauerkraut and pork (homemade sauerkraut, of course) to more contemporary fare such as maple-soy salmon and fettuccini with chicken and pesto. Styrna admits, though, that the humble potato features heavily on the family menu. Each summer, she and her parents lug 500 pounds of Maxim's potatoes home from Thorndike, Maine. "The dirt is still clinging to them," says Styrna. "They're what a potato is supposed to taste like." Styrna is looking forward to a family reunion next month, the first in 30 years. Her extended family is coming together in celebration of the book and in appreciation of the recipes that her cousins thought were long gone. "I'm a teacher and a cook, not a writer," says Styrna. "I simply meant to gather the recipes to enjoy in my retirement. The biggest surprise is that this is not one of those spiral-bound cookbooks. It's a top quality book. One thing just led to another, and grew way beyond anything I could have imagined." Styrna's now working on a cookbook with her Timberlane students, getting them to contribute recipes that have been handed down in their families. Will that be the end of her cookbook career? "I don't know about that," says Styrna. "Now the faculty are clamoring for their own cookbook, too!" To interview or book an event with Joan Styrna, send email to Joan and give us your location, suggested date, and program details. We'll respond as soon as possible. Happy cooking!
Peter E. Randall Publisher LLC |
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