As our League members are no doubt aware, our first General Membership Meeting of 2017 is quickly approaching on February 7! Since we are celebrating the 85th birthday of the Junior League of Baton Rouge AND the 80th reprint of River Road Recipes I: A Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine this year, we thought we would throw it back to our September 2009 General Membership Meeting, when we celebrated the 50th birthday of River Road Recipes I: A Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine!
Junior League members with special guest speaker, former Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden.
With over 1.4 million copies sold since the original edition was printed in September 1959, River Road Recipes I is the oldest community cookbook still in print in the United States.
Junior League members showing off the special 50th Anniversary limited edition cover of River Road Recipes I.
After so many decades of success, it’s hard to imagine that this historic cookbook almost never came to be. When the idea for a cookbook was first proposed by the original Junior League of Baton Rouge cookbook committee in 1957, the League’s financial advisors (incidentally, a group of men) strongly advised against it. “It was another generation, the men thought we couldn’t do anything,” Emily Robinson, chair of the the original cookbook committee, recalled in an interview with Country Roads Magazine in 2011.
Let them eat cake, or rather, humble pie! Years later, after witnessing the enduring success of River Road Recipes I, one of the financial advisors finally admitted to Robinson, “We gave you bad advice.”
The River Road Recipes I 50th birthday cake!
Make sure you log in to your member home page through Digital Cheetah to RSVP for next week’s meeting if you haven’t already. Can’t wait to see you there!
