It's 5:40 on a Friday morning in March. Ryan's truck just backed out of the driveway for the plant, my coffee is still too hot to drink, and Granny June's recipe box is open on the kitchen peninsula next to a stack of budgeting projects I promised to grade by Monday.
The box is red tin, about the size of a brick, with a dent in the lid from a fall off a truck seat sometime before I was born. Inside are a little over a hundred index cards in my grandmother's slanted handwriting. Some are dated, most are stained, and the chess pie card from 1974 has a grease spot shaped like Ohio.
I'm Erin Callahan. I teach family and consumer sciences at a middle school in Maury County, which is what my students' grandparents still call home ec. That means cooking labs, kitchen safety, sewing on machines older than the kids, and a budgeting unit where sixth graders find out what a gallon of milk costs. I've been there since 2012, after three years at a high school in Marshall County, and I still love the moment a twelve-year-old figures out why the biscuits rose.
Ryan, my husband, grew up in Columbia and works as a maintenance electrician at the plant on the north side of Spring Hill. He's on shift by six every morning, which is why I'm up this early. He runs the grills at our house: a 2009 Weber kettle and a pellet grill we bought four years ago this month. At cookouts he keeps a thermometer probe in his shirt pocket the way other men keep a pen.
Nora is eleven and in fifth grade. She bakes, she writes price lists in gel pen, and she will not eat anything spicy, which will come up. Jack is seven, in second grade, starts baseball next month and ranks every meal he eats out of ten. Waylon, our redbone coonhound mix, has lived under the kitchen island since 2020 and considers anything that hits the floor his.
We live on the Williamson County side of Spring Hill in a 2007 brick house with a builder-grade kitchen, a gas range and a chest freezer in the garage. I grew up in Lewisburg, about thirty-five minutes southeast, mostly at my grandmother's table. My mom and dad still live there. Mom brings deviled eggs to everything. Dad keeps a few cows and a garden big enough to feed half the county.
Granny June and the box
June Petty was a farm wife outside Lewisburg, a church cook and the pie lady at every funeral and homecoming within ten miles. She died in March of 2019, six years ago this month, and I came home with three things: the recipe box, her 10-inch cast iron skillet from the 1950s, and a cutting from her fig tree that's now a bush by our back fence. It hasn't given us a real crop yet. I'm patient.
Her cards are short. The biscuit card says flour, lard, buttermilk, hot oven, and not much else, because she kept the rest in her hands. So when I work one of her recipes out with real measurements, I write a new card with the date and my changes and file it behind hers. Never in front. She'd have rolled her eyes at the whole system, and then she'd have checked my math.
Why "compass"
The crumbs are the kitchen. The compass is the car. Teachers get breaks on a fixed calendar, so we use them: a night or two somewhere within a day's drive, picked mostly by what people eat there. We have two rules. Everybody tries one bite of the local thing, then orders whatever they want. And every receipt goes into an envelope in the glove box, so when we get home I can add up what the food cost per person. I've also tracked our groceries in a spreadsheet since January, mostly because I teach a budgeting unit and was starting to feel like a hypocrite.
Spring break starts in ten days, and we're going to Chattanooga for one night: the aquarium, the Incline Railway, a big Southern breakfast and a MoonPie stop. You'll get the envelope total.
What you'll find here
- Dinners: what actually gets made on school nights, including grading weeks and baseball nights.
- Southern Classics: Granny's cards, one at a time. Biscuits first, since I've been chasing hers for fifteen years.
- Baking: pies, cakes and whatever Nora is selling this week.
- Grilling: Ryan's department. His first brisket of the year is already on the calendar.
- Food Trips: where we drove, what we ate and what it cost.
- Kitchen Notes: grocery numbers, cast iron care and the tools that earn their drawer.
The coffee's cool enough now, and those projects won't grade themselves. Thanks for reading. Come back for the biscuits.
