by Lisa Bicknell, CVT Editor
For those who always have room for another cookbook in their collection, this one has several appealing themes.
Think Kentucky, back roads, restaurants, and recipes. Now, how could you possibly go wrong with a combination like that?
Filled with colorful pictures of tempting dishes and recipes to create them, as well as photos of the places where they are created, Kentucky Back Road Restaurant Recipes: A Cookbook and Restaurant Guide” even features The Twin, a local walk-up restaurant.
If you’ve ever wondered what goes into the cake used in The Twin’s famous hot fudge cake, you can find the recipe in this book.
Anita Musgrove, the book’s author, writes in the preface, “I like traveling back roads with no particular place to be and no certain time to be there.”
In the process of exploring, she has put together a book that is part travel guide, part restaurant directory and part cookbook.
Each eatery is described briefly, and most are accompanied by a recipe and photo.
Some of the recipes are “restaurant recipes,” which means they are proportioned to feed a crowd. One of those is Sharon’s cabbage rolls, which uses three large heads of cabbage, five pounds of ground beef and a pound of sausage, among other things.
Tucked between the descriptions of inviting spots to eat are descriptions of a few nearby attractions that are not food-related, making the book a handy day-trip planning tool.
The variety of places included in the book is enough to make it interesting, with names like Coon Dog Inn Restaurant located in Fredonia, Kentucky.
There’s a page devoted to the Jefferson Davis Memorial, as well as a Jefferson Davis pie.
Not only are there fancier restaurants featured from the cities of Lexington and Louisville, but there are unassuming family restaurants in small towns that have been in business for years.
I would like to have seen a map included in the book with the featured restaurants marked on it. I’m sure they wouldn’t be hard to look up, but a map would have been handy.
In the guide, the state is divided into four regions for culinary exploration. Locals might never have heard of many of the ones in the far-western part of the state, but there are some familiar names, including the Paddy Wagon in Richmond, R.T’s, Hangers, The Red River Rockhouse in Campton and Kathy’s Country Kitchen in Clay City.
For the person who likes to find interesting new places to eat or new recipes to try, this book would make a great Christmas gift.