Prairie Kitchen Sampler

Showing the same devotion to detail as her mother, prairie wife Alice Mickish Hendrickson, did when copying her first recipe for ``Brown Stone Front Cake'' into her notebook on August 7, 1922, daughter Fritz calls to mind her mother's cookstoves, iceboxes and recipes in this thorough but oddly distant memoir of life and times in rural Buffalo County, Neb. The 300 recipes for early-20th-century farm foods (e.g., baked beans) and details of cold-packing beef, for one, make the book a useful historic document. But Fritz's refashioning of her mother's memories into modern, prosaic sentences robs Hendrickson of an authentic voice. She also makes little effort to divine the larger meaning of Hendrickson's life; while full of recollection, the volume is not big on reflection. Whatever artistry Fritz displays comes from her immersion in minutiae--the proportion of flat to upright corn cobs in a basket of corn cob kindling, or the polishing of an enamel stove with waxed bread wrappers. Emotional moments arise not from the writing but from the unexpected recognition of forgotten phrases on the page--``White House Cake,'' ``Never-Fail Chocolate Frosting.'' (Mar.)