Happy Independence Day to all of you! How many of you do things on a whim—spur of the moment—or whatever?

I’m invited to join friends for a picnic after the Livingston Rodeo tonight and the blueberries are beautiful right now, so I decided to bake an angel food cake from scratch. Luckily, I brought my old standby cookbook to Montana, “The Farm Cook and Rule Book,” published in 1976 by Harcourt Brace Janovich in New York. I hope all of you have this cookbook, which is considered a standard for all who love to cook. It also has lots and lots of old cures for almost everything, as well as cleaning hints.

It reminded me that I don’t think I’ve written about Nell Beaubien Nichols previously. Nell Beaubien Nichols wrote the first edition of “The Farm Cook and Rule Book,” in 1923. The edition I have, which was a Christmas gift from Emma Jeanne and Warner Adams, was written as Ms. Nichols was preparing to retire. If you check the list of her cookbooks with Amazon, you will find that she wrote and edited over fifty cookbooks during her amazing career which spanned as many years.

Why is Nell Beaubien Nichols important to this page? Because she was born in Maple Hill and spent the first 10 years of her long life living on her parent’s farm on Mill Creek and at the Goddard Ranch at Vera, Kansas. Her father was Hector Edmund Alexis Beaubien and her mother was Rachel A. (Curtis) Beaubien. Her grandmother was Mary C. (Blanchet) Beaubien, who owned the farm which most of us knew as the Frank McClelland Farm or the Don and Hattie McClelland Farm, and who also built Maple Hill’s first hotel, the Beaubien Hotel in 1887 near the Rock Island Depot. Both the Beaubien and Curtis families were early Maple Hill residents, arriving about 1870. Many people who were not lodgers at the Beaubien Hotel appeared there for meals. Initially, that meal was likely to cost one bit, or .25 cents. By the time Mrs. Beaubien closed the hotel in 1929, the price had doubled!

Nell (Beaubien) Nichols was born in her grandmother’s new frame farm house on Mill Creek on August 28, 1894. The Edmund and Mary C. Beaubien had bought their farm from Stephen Bourassa in 1871 and had occupied the Bourassa’s large log house until it burned. By then, Mrs. Beaubien was a young widow and continued to operate the farm as well as the Beaubien Hotel, and did so successfully. She built the large two-story frame house with lumber cut on her own farm and milled nearby. The house remained pretty much in its original condition until it was torn down after the deaths of Don and Hattie McClelland. I’ll include a photo with Nell Beaubien standing in front of the house with other family members.

Nell Beaubien graduated from Dodge City High School and attended the University of Wisconsin, where she eventually received a Masters Degree in home economics and journalism in 1920. For a woman to receive a Masters Degree in 1920, was unheard of and in fact, it was the first such degree issued by The University of Wisconsin. Her thesis was on the uses of and for a new food, which was just coming onto the scene in American agriculture: soybeans!

Nell returned to Kansas from Wisconsin where she wrote columns about food and household help items for Topeka’s, The Capper Farm Press, where her husband Floyd Nichols was also a writer and later manager. Both were Kansas natives. Her columns were widely read and she soon became well-known to farm women all over Kansas and the Midwest. She then became food editor for The Woman’s Home Companion and was a nationally recognized authority on country food cooking and life. In the 1950s, she became associated with The Farm Journal, first as food editor and then as field food editor. He career became a family matter when her daughter, Mary Elizabeth (Nichols) McCracken and granddaughter, Janet S. McCracken, joined her in writing, reviewing and testing food recipes. I have had the pleasure of knowing Janet McCracken for several years now and she has been very helpful in supplying information and photographs.

Nell Beaubien Nichols wrote and edited cook books until in her 80s and died at the home of her daughter in Des Moines, Iowa in 1984. Since only her youth was spent in the Maple Hill Community, not many of us knew that America’s best known cookbook author was one of our own.

I enjoy the 1976 edition of Mrs. Nichol’s cookbook so well, because in the center of the page the original 1923 cookbook is printed and in the margins, are her handwritten 1976 notes to update the recipe. The original recipes are written for wood and coal range cooking and often have old-fashioned farm measurements such as pinch, speck, etc. The 1976 version modernizes all that but still keeps the old-fashioned farm cook style. If you want to cook with lots of butter, sugar, eggs and bacon drippings—this is your book!

I tried to get a good scan of the angel food recipe but couldn’t so I’ll include a photograph of the page from the cook book, but I’ll also repeat the recipe here:

Angel Food Cake
1 cupful of egg whites (about six but depends on the egg size)
1 cupful of sugar
1 cupful of flour
1/2 teaspoonful cream of tarter
1/2 teaspoonfull vanilla
A speck of salt

Beat the egg whites to a froth, add the cream of tartar and continue beating until stiff. Sift the sugar and flour five times. Beat in the sugar gradually. Fold in the flour, salt and vanilla. Bake in a clean tin about 45 minutes in a slow oven.

1976 Additions and Interpretations:
Today’s angel-food cakes, baked in heat controlled ovens and made with cake flour, are baked in a moderate oven (375F) 30 to 35 minutes. Old-time cooks used a slow oven, but no one knows what the real temperature was.

Miss Emily Adams, Emma Jeanne Adams and Mrs. Margaret (George) McClelland were known for their beautiful angel food cakes for all manner of Maple Hill social events. All were friends of Nell (Beaubien) Nichols and used this recipe but doubled it for modern angel food cake pans. In the 1920s, angel foods were baked in rectangular pans and cut in squares.

Incidentally, this book is out of print but I checked today and there are numerous copies available on both EBAY and Amazon for $12 to $20.

I intend to write a great deal more about the Beaubien and Blanchet families in the future. They were remarkable in the number of family members who achieved notoriety as journalists.

Have a happy, healthy and safe day! Try the angel food cake. Its not as intimidating as its reputation.

Photo 1 – Cover of “The Farm Cook and Rule Book,” 1976 edition
Photo 2 – Photo from book of Nell (Beaubien) Nichols
Photo 3 – Photo of page from “The Farm Cook and Rule Book”
Photo 4 – The Beaubien Hotel, built 1887
Photo 5 – The Mary C. Beaubien farmhouse south of Maple Hill. Nell Beaubien is the little girl standing most right. Mary C. Beaubien is the older lady in the front yard, and the man is Hector Beaubien, Nell’s father and Mary Beaubien’s son.