Guest Post by Ane Mulligan about her new release High Cotton

by Ane Mulligan  @AneMulligan

Southern mamas show love to their families much like the Italian women do, urging them to eat. During the Great Depression, there wasn’t much money for extravagant meals or luxury foods. Women relied on their creativity.

In my newest novel, In High Cotton, my heroine, Maggie Parker, owns a small grocery store in a teensy tiny farm town in rural South Georgia. According to Maggie:

To say Rivers End is a small town is an understatement. It amounts to a block-and-a-half of stores, a theater, a library, one bar-slash-gas station, and a couple of churches—the Methodist and the Catholic. The Baptist preacher is a traveling one, so most of the Baptists worship with the Methodists—strange bedfellows, but it works in Rivers End. The town exists for and serves mostly farmers. Still, we’re a tight knit community, especially the merchants who live and work in the tiny town.

Owning a grocery gives Maggie access to more foods than the average farm wife. However, her circumstances demand extreme measures. A new tax has been levied by the Georgia legislature, and Maggie owes $273.42, while her annual income barely peaks over $700. That forced me to research Depression era recipes.

Southern women often used peanuts as a source of protein. There’s a meatless oaf using peanuts, cottage cheese, rice and eggs as the main ingredients. It would provide plenty of protein without any meat. I have 7 recipes in the book, but here are two of them, and yes, we tried each one of them.

Carrot Loaf

1 1/2 c ground raw carrots

1 c boiled rice

1 c ground peanuts

1 egg

salt, pepper

2 tbsp red or green peppers

3 tbsp minced bacon or other fat

1 tbsp onion juice

1/2 tsp mustard

Mix ingredients in order and bake the loaf in a moderate oven 1 hour. Serve tomato sauce if desired.

Hardscrabble Salad

1 can yellow hominy, drained

1 can black eyed peas, drained

1 green pepper, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

1 small onion, chopped

2 ribs celery, diced

1/4 cup cooking oil, optional (I use olive oil)

1/4 cup vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

Mix all the above ingredients together and serve hot or cold.

In High Cotton

Southern women may look as delicate as flowers, but there’s iron in their veins.

                             

While the rest of the world has been roaring through the 1920s, times are hardscrabble in rural South Georgia. Widow Maggie Parker is barely surviving while raising her young son alone. Then as banks begin to fail, her father-in-law threatens to take her son and sell off her livelihood—the grocery store her husband left her. Can five Southern women band together, using their wisdom and wiles to stop him and survive the Great Depression?

Ane Mulligan has been a voracious reader ever since her mom instilled within her a love of reading at age three, escaping into worlds otherwise unknown. But when Ane saw PETER PAN on stage, she was struck with a fever from which she never recovered—stage fever. She submerged herself in drama through high school and college. One day, her two loves collided, and a bestselling, award-winning novelist emerged. She lives in Sugar Hill, GA, with her artist husband and a rascally Rottweiler. Find Ane on her website, Amazon Author page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and The Write Conversation.