State fare: New publication features recipes gleaned from popular Utah cookbooks

Those who think that Utah cuisine consists mainly of Jell-O salads and Funeral Potatoes should check out the "Best of the Best From Utah Cookbook," compiled by Gwen McKee and Barbara Moseley, both of Mississippi. Sure, those perennial favorites are there, but so are recipes as varied as Dutch Oven Pot Roast, Grilled Chicken Teriyaki, Ultimate Jambalaya, Chile Relleno Eggs, Penne alla Siciliana, and Deer Valley's Chocolate Snowball. They all came from popular Utah cookbooks.

"It's a good sample of a lot of different foods from all over the state," said McKee, who was visiting Utah last week to promote the book.

More than 20 years ago, she and Moseley set out to find the "best" recipes from different cookbooks and compile them into one book, on a state-by-state basis. They started with Mississippi and continued with Gwen's native state of Louisiana in 1984. Over the years, they made a book on every state in the Union, with Utah and Nevada the last in the series. The Utah book was just published, and the Nevada book is now being printed, McKee said. (They're available for $16.96 from Quail Ridge Press, 1-800-343-1583, or www.quailridge.com.)

Why was Utah at the end of the list? "We had no rhyme or reason for that, it just happened that way," said McKee, who regularly skied in Park City with her family long before doing the cookbook.

Putting together Utah's book was easier than their early projects, when they drove into rural communities to scout for local cookbooks. "There was no Internet. The only way you could find these books was to go and stop at a little drugstore and find out that the ladies had put together a cookbook for their chamber of commerce."

And they learned it's true: You should never judge a book by its cover. Some of the most modest-looking books had the best recipes, McKee said.

"But some of them weren't written perfectly, and we wanted them so that anybody could follow them," she said. "So we were the editors. If the recipe calls for moose, we tell you if you can substitute deer or beef, so no matter where you are, if you can get to a supermarket, you can cook it." (Well, OK, except for those seal blubber recipes in the Alaska cookbook that they included for novelty's sake.)

Over the years they traveled more than 110,000 miles, evaluated over 10,000 cookbooks, and selected 17,214 recipes for their series.