About The Cookbooks

About "Cooking With Cow"

"Cooking With Cow" has nothing to do with beef. Well, there might be some beef recipes in there, but Cow is actually a nickname for my sister, Carol Ferguson Jancsi. She put together her cookbook over many years, giving out new pages as she added them. Unlike the Carl and Hugh recipes, most of Cow's recipes have been tested by someone still living to tell about it. An absolute family favorite from this cookbook is Garlic Shrimp.

About "Cooking with Carl, Hugh and your Friends"

In 1974, J. Carl Ferguson, Jr. of Kaiser Aluminum, and Hugh Griffiths of Sangamo Electric, put together a cookbook for the annual meeting of the E.E.I. Purchasing and Stores Committee (an electrical products industry group). This cookbook included many recipes of the committee members and their wives - mostly the wives - and was called "Cooking with Carl, Hugh and Your Friends". I have tried, as much as possible, to leave the text exactly as written, except where it didn't make sense (and a couple of them still don't make sense, but they're in the cookbook anyway). The women who contributed most of the recipes were middle-class housewives, many of whom were born during the depression and grew up during WWII. Most of them didn't work outside the home; they stayed home to take care of the kids and the house. This was just before the birth of "women's liberation", and many of them were identified by their husband's name: Mrs. John Smith, for example. The nice thing about "Carl and Hugh" is that it does give you a glimpse into what families were eating in the 60s and 70s.

By the way, we haven't tested many of these recipes, so if you find an error, let us know. Some of these recipes are fairly old and ingredients commonly available when they were written may not be so common now. Many of the recipes suggest using "oleo", which is what margarine used to be called, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Also, I recently noticed that there are a lot of recipes that include MSG as an ingredient. Most of them are probably fine without it. Two favorites from this cookbook: Elephant Stew 😉 and Lemon Onion Barbecue Chicken.

From The Ferguson Family

Okay, the truth is just about every recipe in here is from the Ferguson family. Let's face it: I'm a Ferguson! Still, this helps point you in the right direction if you happened to be at a family event and wondered how that delicious Mary's Meatloaf or the Walking Tostada Mexican bean dip was made. You can find them here.

Uncle Dave's Cookbook

These are some of Uncle Dave's - yeah, that's me - favorite recipes. I have actually made some of these and not died from any of them. My favorites? Uncle Dave's Husky Treats, of course. Sausage Gravy. Make Ahead Blender Hollandaise. Actually, just about anything on the Favorite Recipes page!

Sweet Stuff

This was originally just a test cookbook. May still be one. Not much in it right now and there are plenty of other ways to track down your favorite sweet treat. But I am leaving it here, mostly because there is no one to stop me!

The TFR Cookbook

Probably the least exciting cookbook in the bunch, The TFR Cookbook used to be called "All". Every recipe submitted goes into this book, mostly for archival reasons, in case I need to print or store a record of every recipe outside of the database.

About "The Sears Sun"

Way back in my sordid past, sometime in the middle 1990s, I helped put together a collection of recipes by folks at my work called "The Sears Sun". You guessed it: I worked at Sears in Modesto, California, for waaaay too long. The cookbook never got printed, but it has remained alive on my computer and it is part of The Ferguson Recipes. Some of the recipes are just plain weird. I think there is one for Italian Chicken that involves dumping a bottle of Wishbone Italian on chicken for a few hours and then cooking it. Simple, but weird.

About "The Politics of Cuisine"

"The Politics of Cuisine" is an upcoming publicatioon by University of California, Merced Political Science professors Nathan Monroe and Courtenay Conrad, dedicated to investigating how politics--government actions, and citizens reactions to those actions--shape and change cuisine. Here we bring these stories to life by sharing the recipes behind the stories!

Recipes by John Ferguson"

These are recipes that were especially loved by the late John Carl Ferguson, III, who loved to cook, and who left us way too soon. There aren't enough of his recipes here, but those that are are truly delicious. One of the ones I will always remember is Jersey Beef, but I have never dared make it since he passed away. I doubt if I would come close to doing is justice.

About "The Gussie Files"

Our Aunt Gussie Rush left a big card file full of recipes, most of them neatly type on 3" x 5" index cards. As of the date below, I have begun transcribing those recipes. Gussie was born in 1911 and died in 1997; most of her recipes are from the 1940s thru the 1980s. There is a lot of margarine and a lot of shortening, and a lot of terms that we don't even use today.
One thing I do love about Gussie's files is that the recipe cards are impeccably typed, as she had been an executive secretary for most of her career. It is these cards that influenced the way I want measurements and abbreviations to be formatted here.