Douglas Robinson's 'I Grew Up in Southwestern Pennsylvania Cookbook,' reflects what this region likes to eat
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Southwestern Pennsylvania cookbook compiler Douglas Robinson with, from left, Abby, wife Laura and Doug Jr.
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Douglas Robinson knows that Southwestern Pennsylvania is something that gets into your blood, and often it's from the food.
That's how he explains his passion for sauerkraut to his son, who hates the stuff. Twelve-year-old Doug Jr. told his Dad, "I'm from Southwestern Pennsylvania, too, but I don't like sauerkraut."
"I said, 'You wait,'" his Dad told him. "You'll be craving that stuff when you're older because you'll be smelling it in your head."
Mr. Robinson, who as a boy grew up in Uniontown, smelled the sauerkraut and the pierogies and chipped ham and the other foods from home during the two decades he lived far away from here in Florida. Like many others of his generation, he couldn't wait to leave Southwestern Pennsylvania. But after he moved his family back here around the year 2000, "I couldn't run fast enough to show all my kids the [cool] stuff here."
He shares his love for his region in a book he recently self-published, the "I Grew Up in Southwestern Pennsylvania Cookbook."
The spiral-bound book is thick with regional recipes, but it's also sprinkled liberally with factoids and photographs about this area that Mr. Robinson so enthusiastically embraces.
He calls his new publishing business Enjoy Life Publications, which grew out of his book-selling business, online now as the Enjoy Life Bookstore.
He used to work as a maintenance supervisor -- at a residential building in Oakland before he took a job at California University of Pennsylvania, which is how he wound up in Bentleyville, Washington County, where he still lives.
Many of the recipes in the book are compiled from his neighbors and friends and relatives, while others he tracked down from non-copyrighted sources.
It was from his business of buying and selling books that he learned how popular cookbooks, especially little local ones such as those published by schools and churches, can be.
He came home from one book sale, where he wound up feeling pressured into giving an older woman a cookbook he'd just bought, and told his wife, Laura, "You wouldn't believe how people love these kinds of cookbooks because there are recipes in there that you can't get anywhere else."
First Published July 7, 2011 12:00 am
