For over fifty years Evelyn Birkby has written a weekly column entitled "Up a Country Lane" for her hometown newspaper. Along with recipes and household tips Birkby passed on stories of family and friends and her personal philosophy of life, which can best be described as neighborly and generous. In Up a Country Lane Cookbook, she has gathered the very best of those recipes and interspersed them with a wealth of stories of rural life in the 1940s and 1950s to create a book that encompasses a forgotten era.Up a Country Lane Cookbook is, then, much more than a cookbook. It is an evocation of a time and place in all its wonder and complexity. From her vantage point as a farm wife Living in Mill Greek Valley in southwestern Iowa, Birkby observed the changes that accompanied improved roads, telephone service, and the easy availability of electricity. Her observations have been carefully recorded for more than fifty years in her newspaper column, read by thousands of rural Iowans.