By Laura Fries
"If you just leave me one thing, I need the recipe!" Dolly Tickell implored her aging Uncle Harold. Savin Rock Amusement Park had a secret recipe for caramel corn that made carnivalgoers line up outside Peter Frank's Fun House in West Haven, Conn. Only Uncle Harold knew the secret. In the late 1940s and '50s, his parents had pried the recipe out of the owner of the park, and now, Tickell was trying to get it out of him.
She succeeded, and after much experimentation, reduced the 55-gallon recipe down to less-circus like proportions. She surprised Uncle Harold with a batch last year—he hadn't eaten the treat since 1960. It's just one of the recipes featured in Gulfport Cooks!, a community cookbook that preserves the memories and identities of its residents.
Story Stew
The adventurous cooks had set out to raise funds for the Chamber of Commerce, but in the process, they discovered they were storytellers. Dolly Tickell, who found handwritten messages in the margins of her grandmother's cookbooks after her death, was inspired to include notes of her own that explained the origins of her recipes. Doris Flowerday waxed eloquent on the wonders of Indian cuisine, while others simply included dedications. The voices of Gulfport are captured in the recipes: Chef Tommy Sapp's smoked fish spread, Police Chief Curt Willocks' Momo's Cold Oven Pound Cake and Zlatko "Goldy" Horvatich's Croatian Bear Paw Cookies.
Replicating the recipes, in many senses, tells the stories associated with them. Flowerday's Mock Whipped Cream frosting reminds her of her family, the Zimmermans, who emigrated from Germany and started a bakery in Detroit. Tickell's caramel corn recipe is a reminder of her Uncle Harold. And the recipe for Elephant Stew—which calls for a two-month-long chopping process for a dish that feeds 3,642? Well, that's Gulfport for you. "You can't get cornier than that," Tickell says.
At the Gulfport Chamber of Commerce—a nondescript room in a Bank of America branch office-Tickell, Flowerday and Helen Adornato gather round the cookbook, playfully baiting each other into rounds of well-aged laughter. Just mentioning Horvatich's recipe sends the ladies into titters: at once, they fall over themselves to tell his story. He couldn't remember whether it was baking powder or baking soda, they recall. They describe Goldy as a fit man in his 70s with "zero body fat" and "skin tight T-shirts and very short shorts," with a habit of swimming in the Boca Ciega Bay every morning: "You'll see him coming back with a huge beach ball, which he attaches to himself when he swims so that boats don't hit him," they say.
"There's probably a lot of recipes from other places, because there are a lot of people in Gulfport from other places," says Michele King, advertising director for the cookbook. "We have a fairly large Lithuanian [and] Russian population here," King said, "so there's got to be recipes in there that they brought with them."
Including the recipes in the community cookbook was a way of keeping stories alive, as the women relate. Tickell wrote notes to her sons in their cookbooks and Helen Adornato, editor of the cookbook, sent copies to her family for Christmas. "I think a lot of what this book represents, too—I think a lot of those recipes that were in this book were put in the book so that they would be preserved," King says. "I think that Gulfport people wanted those recipes saved for the next generation."
Prep Work
Gulfport Cooks! was the brainchild of Adornato, a Realtor active in the Chamber of Commerce. Her idea quickly found supporters in fellow members, and soon a full-fledged committee was soliciting recipes for their first publication. Flowerday, recruited to transcribe the recipes, bore the brunt of the chaos. Jokes Adornato, "I'm sure she curses the day she called and said, 'Helen, I would like to help you.'"
At first, there was a dry spell. With few recipes trickling in, Tickell, one of the main organizers of the project, resorted to her own recipes, handwriting them for submission late at night after she had gotten into bed. When the recipes finally started to come in—thanks to advertising in The Gabber community newspaper, newsletters and word of mouth—the committee members found themselves overwhelmed by material, and unwilling to cut a line of it for fear of hurting someone's feelings.
They experimented with font size, paper width and page count. The price kept rising—and doubled, when committee members realized they'd miscalculated. "Hence," jokes King, "the debt of the Chamber of Commerce."
The fundraiser has yet to recoup its printing costs, having only sold an estimated 150 copies of the 500 included in the first print run. Committee members were making plans for book signings at Barnes & Noble and Borders when they heard the news: Without a bar code on the back cover, they couldn't put their book on the shelves.
It was a disappointment that they took in stride. "We were flying by the seat of our pants," says Tickell. Still, the organizers remain confident that the cookbook will succeed in the long run. "There will be a second printing. I know there will," King says. And for the moment, there are no plans for a follow-up, as King relates. "We're not doing another book. We're just going to do this one over and over."
Flowerday's favorite recipe is her pistachio party cake, a bright green, almond-flavored cake garnished with chopped nuts. But for her, it's more than just a green delicacy. It's a reminder of her first year of married life, when she developed the recipe.
Gulfport Cooks! is available at select area businesses and the Gulfport Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 5212, Gulfport, FL, 33737.