The 14th annual Huck Boyd Lecture took place yesterday afternoon in the K-State Alumni Center Ballroom. The Huck Boyd Lecture series was created to share the importance of community journalism. The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications selects a different speaker each year.
This year, Jane P. Marshall, instructor in hospitality management and dietetics and communications coordinator in the College of Human Ecology, spoke about her cookbook, “Teatime to Tailgates: 150 Years at the K-State Table.”
“It took me a little more than two years,” Marshall said. “Like any journalist, I over-reported. I spent days researching Washington pie and I still didn’t find anything.”
Many different recipes bring the cookbook together. Recipes range from steak to Mulberry pie. Her lecture focused on not only a good home cooked Kansas meal, but how it came together, thanks to many different K-State alumni and members of the community.
Doris Miller, Manhattan resident, had a personal tie to the cookbook: her grandmother’s buttermilk pie. According to Miller, her grandmother taught her how to sew and cook.
“Listening to the lecture brought up a lot of memories of her,” Miller said. “She always said she made a mean buttermilk pie and it was quite delicious.”
With all the contributors’ help, Marshall said she was pleased with her end result. Unlike other cookbooks it has ties to the university, using past alumni’s input and recipes to share with the rest of the K-State family. Marshall also had help from the archives of Hale Library and the Riley County Historical Society.
Through her interaction with the people of the library and historical society, Marshall discovered some new and odd recipes, such as grasshopper, cookies that use roasted grasshoppers in them. She eventually changed the name to “chocolate chirper cookies” and left out the roasted grasshoppers.
“Food touches people’s lives, just as a newspaper does,” Marshall said.
Throughout her lecture, Marshall made the connection between a pie and a newspaper. According to Marshall, there are many different parts that go into a pie. Just like a newspaper, a recipe is used to put together something that will draw readers into it.
“Sometimes it’s not the food we cherish, but the bonds and memories that food represents,” Marshall writes in her first chapter.
Sara Soph, freshman in public relations, was surprised to see some dining center recipes in the cookbook.
“She had the Kansas Dirt recipe that they serve in the Derb,” Soph said. “I really wanted to buy the cookbook because that stuff is really good.”
