In 1957, when the cookbook our readers voted as their favorite of all was first proposed by a committee from the Junior League of Baton Rouge, the idea was hardly welcomed with open arms. The League’s financial advisors, a group of men, told the group it would never work.
“It was another generation, the men thought we couldn’t do anything,” recalls Emily Robinson, the original cookbook committee chair.
One million, three hundred thousand copies later, it appears they were wrong.
“We gave you bad advice,” Robinson recalls one of those advisors confessing years later, to which she responded. “We showed you, didn’t we?”
Robinson attributes much of the success of River Road Recipes to the care that went into planning that first edition.
“They were checked three times—every recipe that was in there. We didn’t hurry. It took us a year and a half to do the cookbook.”
As careful as the women of the Junior League were about creating the cookbook, they were equally resourceful in their marketing.
Members would bring a suitcase full of cookbooks wherever they went on vacation to sell. And in a speech given to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication last year, Anniversary Committee Chair Julie Carville Jones, recounted the tale of one particularly resourceful member, Ann Arbour, who won the contest to name the cookbook.
“Mrs. Arbour not only named our cookbook, she, her sisters and their mother ensured the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans would sell the books in the gift shop by taking turns inquiring about a copy of River Road Recipes cookbook throughout their weekend stay. The clerk finally said, ‘This is about the sixth request I’ve had in only two days for that book. Can you tell me how I can purchase some?’”
Today there are four different versions of the River Road Recipes cookbooks in print, and as evidence that Junior League members are just as innovative today as they were a half-century ago, an electronic edition –with nifty features like one that automatically adjusts ingredient quantities when you want a larger or smaller amount, and another that lets you print place cards.
But for many, including our readers and Emily Robinson, that first version will always be special.
“For me it will always be one of the best cookbooks,” says Robinson, who to this day has the very first copy of that original printing. juniorleaguebr.org.
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