SerVe | The American Legion Auxiliary Unit 1879
SerVe: Revisiting a Century of American Legion Auxiliary Cookbooks
By The American Legion Auxiliary Unit 1879
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Ann Diaz: I'm Ann Diaz, and I'm here to talk about SerVe: Revisiting a Century of American Legion, Auxiliary cookbooks.
Suzy Chase: If you like this podcast, please be sure to tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. Growing up, I was familiar with the American Legion hall that was located in Overland Park, Kansas and bingo and wedding receptions were the only things I knew about the American Legion, but it's so much more than that. Many of us don't know the story of the American Legion. Could you give us a little history?
Ann Diaz: So most people know that the American Legion is a patriotic service organization that's been around for a long time. It did start in 1919 following World War One when it was observed that returning veterans needed a place to share memories and the challenges of war with each other and so Congress actually authorized the formation of the American Legion. Today there are more than 2 million members, which we call Legionnaires and I think 13,000 posts worldwide so including the United States, also France, Mexico, and the Philippines have Legion posts. But you know, it's really more than a social club, The Legion also offers benefits to veterans and advocates for veterans, and it's also a place for veterans to continue serving their communities a lot of them are service minded they work with youth, you've probably heard of Legion baseball. They also have shooting competitions. They have scholarships and oratorical competitions, and there's also a program called Boys State and Boys Nation. There's also Girls State and Girls Nation it's for juniors and seniors going to be seniors in high school to learn about leadership and citizenship training. So they do a lot of things that people don't always know about. They were also behind, the startup of the VA and they wrote the first draft of the GI bill back in 1944, it was called the servicemen's readjustment act back then. Since that time more than 8 million veterans have gone to college with that bill. So they do a lot in our communities.
Suzy Chase: So the American Legion Auxiliary celebrated 100 years last year, tell us why The Auxiliary was established.
Ann Diaz: So The Auxiliary was established just shortly after The Legion. As you can imagine, the women who were left behind during war time, they were busy, folding bandages, stretching resources, picking up the slack so they were not about to be left behind when it came to ongoing support of veterans and community service. So Congress also agreed and they chartered the American Legion Auxiliary that same year that The American Legion was started back in 1919, our unit, which is called Unit 1879 is the first one to be affiliated with the college campus so that's really cool. Our mission statement for The Auxiliary talks about the spirit of service, not self. We're here to support legionnaires and all veterans active duty service members and their families. There's a lot of fundraising that goes on oftentimes around food, right? Cookbooks, pancake, breakfasts, bake sales. We also educate youth on citizenship and the military, and we have a poppy program that recognizes veterans and raises money for them and gives us an opportunity to connect with veterans. You've seen the poppies, they're just like little red and green paper poppies that we hand out to veterans, take donations if they'd like. It's a fundraiser, but it is a way to connect with veterans.
Suzy Chase: There's quite a bit of setup for this interview. So first, can you describe how this cookbook, a labor of love, came about in 2017 and your involvement?
Ann Diaz: The seeds of the idea started as part of my grad school project, but it really became more powerful as The Auxiliary got involved. My auxiliary sisters in Unit 1879 really brought it to life, but the backstory I think is important too. So I was bothered by the number of veteran suicides and started researching what's known as the civilian military gap, the disconnect that we have today in understanding veterans, because we have a lot fewer connections to the military today. Less than 1% of our adult population serves, where compared to after world war two, where 12% of the adult population served. So there were a lot more family connections, people understood the challenges. So it's easy to stereotype what we don't understand. And it's definitely hard for us to support what we don't understand. So that's the civilian military gap. And I made my way to the local Legion post, wondering if bingo was really like the only way that I could get to know some of the veterans there. And they invited me inside and I wasn't really prepared for that, but suddenly there, I was sitting with about a half a dozen veterans from the Korean war from the Navy. And so I thought, wow, okay, this is my opportunity to get to know them a little bit. And, you know, I realized, I didn't really know how to engage in conversation. I didn't know what to say. So I realized I was part of that problem, part of the civilian military gap. So I went home and I brushed up on my military literacy. I did some research and I had conversations with veterans, with 22 veterans over the course of about five months and the conversations were so diverse, surprisingly diverse and really the only commonality I think was that we were conversing around food. So that was kind of one thing, but it was really transformative for me, any stereotypes that I may have had about patriotism or supporting veterans was kind of shattered in that process and at the same time, I was reading a book of essays called See Me For Who I Am. They were student veterans stories about war and coming home. And there was this line that caught my attention, a student veteran by the name of Jeffrey Norfleet. He wrote something like "I'm a walking discovery channel. Ask me about the cultures I've seen, asked me about the foods that I've eaten, asked me about the countries and the people and the nightlife." And I thought, wow that's really interesting. I could have a conversation about that. So the simple idea of food just kind of kept popping up the idea of the old spiral bound, auxiliary cookbooks. I kept thinking about food. I kept thinking in my out of my element, trying to, you know, write about the military I really don't know anything about the military. Why am I not writing about like food? And then I realized that that was really kind of the bridge, this idea of food and cookbooks and food stories, which is something really that women in the auxiliary have known for generations, right? Show up, bring food, listen simple. Really. So my advisor at CSU and I was just started imagining this historic cookbook, like how it could be a vehicle for increasing military literacy. And then I realized that there was an actual auxiliary unit right there on our campus. And so I met with them. I shared that idea and I realized that I was eligible to join because of my father's service and he's a member of the Legion. This was in 2017. So we had two years because 2019 would begin the hundredth anniversary of the organization. So the ideas kind of started to pour in, collect vintage cookbook from.. Has to be one from at least every state from every era and we're going to start with that. We're going to glean through for recipes and interesting tidbits, but we have different skillsets. We have Debra, who's a retired nurse and Jen, who's a registered dietician. And Rachel, who's really comfortable with technology. She's younger. And she said I can help with the online part of it, the e-commerce and the fulfillment. We have another Rachel who owns a cleaning company. So identifying the interesting household tips throughout the books, we have Karen Boehler, who is a former school principal with a huge servant's heart she's been involved with the Auxiliary for decades she was co-project manager with me. She researched and wrote the histories and many of the food stories for the book, Sharon is a customer service expert so she's really organized and she did our bake sales and help choose recipes. And we just had this great collaboration of skills and talents. I'm a writer and editor. I took a class in InDesign, so I could design the book because I had a vision for what it should look like that allowed us to self publish it and save a lot of money so we can donate more for veterans.
Suzy Chase: I wanted to have you on the cookbook podcast because today is Veterans Day and I want to shine the spotlight on what war means and the sacrifices paid. And I wanted to note that The American Legion family must be nonpolitical. So this is about serving our country and honoring a legacy. Over the past couple of years, as you said, you've been collecting American Legion Auxiliary cookbooks. Where did you find all these cookbooks?
Ann Diaz: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a good challenge. We were really determined to collect one from every state or department they're called in The Legion family and covering all eras so discovering that one really did exist from 1919 was really the jumping off point for the project while it was still in the research stage. I did an online search and found a reprint of a book from Eureka, California from an auxiliary unit there in 1919. So that was the, okay, this is going to work sort of moment that they're out there from that far back. And then a lot of Google searches followed after that. eBay, Amazon just general searches, Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City tracked down about a half a dozen books for us. And some of the online vendors, like a 1920's book from Seymour, Wisconsin is a leather cover with gold embossing on it and they wanted $90 for it. So I wrote and told them what the project was about and they gave us a really nice discount. We did that a couple of times, but all of our ladies reached out to their friends, made personal phone calls. So everybody really did their part. And Karen who I mentioned, our unit president for Rolodex is like a who's who of people in The Auxiliary and so she started reaching out to people and she got us some 1920's books from Idaho that are canvas covered, binder style cookbooks from the 1980's. She has friends in Alaska and Hawaii. So those hard to find books, she helped us with those.
Suzy Chase: The 1919 recipe is the oldest recipe in this cookbook. What's that dish.
Ann Diaz: So those are Clifford Teacakes. Isn't that just a charming, old name? Clifford Teacakes um, you just think of like doilies and fancy China, but really it's like an icebox cookie. You might remember Icebox Cookies? It's almost got like the texture of a biscotti, which people enjoy today so we wanted it to be a contemporary looking book to bridge those generations. So you're not going to see the photo of it on grandmother's China. It's going to be something a little bit more contemporary to kind of illustrate that hey, these are things that maybe your great grandma made, but you would enjoy it today. Some recipes will say like 15 cents worth of ground pork or to cook it in a warm oven and it won't say any amount of time. So we had recipe testers figure all this out for us. We had about 75 recipe testers, including our ladies across the country who volunteered but we paged through all these vintage books once we collected them and we identified and put on a spreadsheet over 600 recipes that were interesting for some reason. So we sent out the original format of them and people had to figure out like, what are some of these things mean? And they filled in the gaps and, and we said, you know, make it a little bit more contemporary, people might not use oleo or lard or whatever. Like what would you use today? We want it to be a book that people will use. They did that. They sent us detailed notes about what they did. They took photos. And then we re typed the recipes that made the cut. And then we sent those out again to another set of recipe testers to make sure that it still made sense and then it was going to work. So every recipe has been tested twice. And then below the title of each recipe in the book, we credit the original contributor and the book title that it was from and the year. So that really connects us to the past.
Suzy Chase: I love that you put some of the recipe tester notes in the cookbook and you call it "Overheard in the Test Kitchen." I thought that was super cute.
Ann Diaz: Yeah, it's kind of like marginalia right like the stuff that you'd maybe scribble in your cookbook.
Suzy Chase: I noticed that most of these recipes are comfort foods and comfort food was so important to the military that the US spent, I couldn't believe this, $1 million in 1945 to convert a barge into a floating ice cream factory. Can you just talk a little bit about comfort food and the connection to home?
Ann Diaz: So it's been said that an army marches on its stomach, that's an old saying, I suppose, with a lot of truth to it. So comfort foods were important and still are important on the military front. It's good for morale. There are some fun stories in the cookbook. There's one about the Hershey's company. So the military, I think this was also during World War II, that the military commission, that Hershey corporation to make a candy bar for field rations.
Suzy Chase: Did it taste funny?
Ann Diaz: Yeah, apparently it took many tries. They didn't want it to taste that great. Those were some of the criteria. They said it had to be small, four ounces so that it would fit in their rucksacks. It had to withstand the heat of the Pacific theater. It had to be high in energy and that it should taste only slightly better than a boiled potato so that the troops wouldn't overindulge. But then it got to the point where I think they got better with the recipe to the point where some service members would trade their cigarettes for the chocolate. Cause they really wanted the chocolate.
Suzy Chase: My dad was in the Korean war. So my mom used to make SOS. Your recipe in the cookbook is from the official USMC Food Service Association recipe from 1952. I didn't realize there were so many different versions of this recipe in different branches of the military, for those who aren't familiar. Can you describe this recipe?
Ann Diaz: Yeah. So it's like a toast covered with a white sauce that either has ground beef or chipped beef in it and my stepdad says when they made the chipped beef, that's when we'd go out for pizza like that, that was really bad. The chipped beef was awful but he also thought that in the Navy, there was more of a tomato base to it. So yeah, it was different in different branches of the military, different recipes. We didn't expect to find that recipe. It's not one that women would have passed down as the pride of their kitchen, but we were just talking about it and started looking for it and then a cookbook from Tennessee showed up in the mail and lo and behold, this recipe from the Marine Corps, this official recipe was in there. So Carrie, one of our members called the local tavern and said, hey would you guys be interested in making this SOS on armed services day a couple of years ago and served it free for veterans who came in. And so veterans came in, they got a free meal, they got to reminisce a little bit and we got to hear some of their stories. So that was pretty cool.
Suzy Chase: Could you tell us about the three-fold mission of this cookbook?
Ann Diaz: So the first part of our mission is to honor the legacy of these women that have served for a hundred years. The second is inspiring conversation, equipping people with tools so they kind of understand the wars that we've been involved in and give them some ideas for conversation about simple things like food. And the third is supporting mental wellness for veterans. So this is of course a fundraiser we're donating nearly a hundred percent of the proceeds because most of our costs were covered either by sponsors or work that we did ourselves. So we're donating proceeds to mental wellness programs for veterans. A lot of the creative arts, The Auxiliary collaborates with the VA on a national veterans creative arts program. Cause that's really good for mental health. And we've also helped publish a book of essays written by veterans in our area. So those are just some of the things so far. And we're just getting started.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.
Ann Diaz: We actually made a nice big pot of Beef Burgundy. It's a recipe in our cookbook and it was delicious. It was missing the homemade bread, but I'm cutting back on carbs right now and my grandma would be really disappointed in that, but it was delicious Beef Burgundy.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find this book on the web and social media?
Ann Diaz: On the web it is alaservecookbook.com is our website. And we also have a Facebook page under the same name, ALA Serve Cookbook where people can find us. They can find us at Kitchen Arts & Letters and some stores in Colorado, but that information is on our website.
Suzy Chase: I think if we all lived by the motto, service not self, our world would be a much better place today on Veterans Day, we give thanks to our service members and veterans. And thank you, Ann for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Ann Diaz: Thank you, Suzy,
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