Clear Lake author Rae Eighmey began her writing career in public relations and advertising, but turned to writing books when her husband’s job took the family to the East Coast, Alabama and Minnesota before they finally settled down in Clear Lake in 2014, where they’d had a summer cottage for the past 30 years.
Eighmey said she worked in advertising and public relations until John accepted a university position as a department chairman at the University of Alabama and she needed to assume the role of a department head’s wife. If it hadn’t been for that, she may never have began her book writing career.
It all started when she found Mrs. Jemison’s household notebook, mixed in with boxes of Senator Robert Jemison’s letters and papers that are part of the University of Alabama Special Collections.
“I started flipping through it and … there were two recipes. One of them was for Sally Lunn, which is a cake that you can find a recipe for anywhere and the other was for a thing called a Jumble,” Eighmey said.
She had no idea what a Jumble was because there were no specific directions or ingredients listed. Curious, she started looking through the University’s collection of cookbooks. “I just started working backwards and worked my way through various Jumble recipes. It’s essentially a doughnut shaped cookie. And back in the era they talked about things being jumble shaped. Not doughnut shaped.”
That led to her first book, “Rae Katherine’s Victorian Recipe Secrets.”
That research, along with her grandmother, Emma Catherine Martin’s, recipe file gave her the confidence to begin the dive into old recipes. “That’s the other thing that the work has shown me, how good these foods made from simple ingredients really are. So that led me to writing about interesting people and fascinating food and weaving those together through all of these books.”
While living in Ames, when John joined the faculty at Iowa State University, Eighmey started doing collaborative work with Farm Progress, the publisher of 22 farming and ranching magazines. She said she wrote books specific to their publications that are annotated with stories about the people she met as she gathered the recipes for wonderful foods that tell the story. Her shift from recipe books to food-related biographical novels happened in Minnesota, when John mentioned that they were coming up on the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and he wondered what kind of food Lincoln might have eaten. “It took me five years to research and write that book, ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen: A Culinary View of Lincoln’s Life and Times.’”
Although the book is more biographically focused than food focused, Eighmey said she still calls it a “culinary biography.” She said she sent the manuscript to a few academic presses and was shocked and awed when Smithsonian Books said they would like to publish it. They even suggested she pick another person in history, which became “Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin: A Founding Father’s Culinary Adventures.”
Eighmey said, “Everybody eats. Some of us cook. So if you can bring food into a conversation of trying to understand a time, a place, a person, I just think it adds an interesting, fascinating dimension and you can kind of be there.”
While working on the Lincoln book, she ran into a story from his younger life that got her to thinking, “What if, what happened, how did it happen, where’s the story,” which led her to her first big deep dive into fiction.
“I found that I liked that mental exercise. It’s different from recipe development. It’s different from historical research. Although there’s always food, I mean I keep finding food, it’s hard to escape from food,” Eighmey said with a laugh.
That mental exercise led her into the body of work she is currently writing, the “Potluck Paradise Cafe” series of novels, two currently available on Amazon. It pulls in historical facts and is set in the fictional town of Lake Lavonia, a place that local readers will immediately recognize.
Eighmey said the third in the six book series should be up on Amazon in December. 2024. “But with fiction I find again, interesting people with fascinating foods, because you know Susan is not just doing casseroles…she realizes she needs to be something much, much more. She needs to bring people in, she needs to get their attention, she needs to, in short, fascinate them with food.”
All of Rae Katherine Eighmey’s books are available on Amazon or peruse through her Potluck Paradise Cafe series of novels at
www.lakelavonia.com.
Clear Lake author Rae Eighmey began her writing career in public relations and advertising, but turned to writing books when her husband’s job took the family to the East Coast, Alabama and Minnesota before they finally settled down in Clear Lake in 2014, where they’d had a summer cottage for the past 30 years.
Eighmey said she worked in advertising and public relations until John accepted a university position as a department chairman at the University of Alabama and she needed to assume the role of a department head’s wife. If it hadn’t been for that, she may never have began her book writing career.
It all started when she found Mrs. Jemison’s household notebook, mixed in with boxes of Senator Robert Jemison’s letters and papers that are part of the University of Alabama Special Collections.
“I started flipping through it and … there were two recipes. One of them was for Sally Lunn, which is a cake that you can find a recipe for anywhere and the other was for a thing called a Jumble,” Eighmey said.
She had no idea what a Jumble was because there were no specific directions or ingredients listed. Curious, she started looking through the University’s collection of cookbooks. “I just started working backwards and worked my way through various Jumble recipes. It’s essentially a doughnut shaped cookie. And back in the era they talked about things being jumble shaped. Not doughnut shaped.”
That led to her first book, “Rae Katherine’s Victorian Recipe Secrets.”
That research, along with her grandmother, Emma Catherine Martin’s, recipe file gave her the confidence to begin the dive into old recipes. “That’s the other thing that the work has shown me, how good these foods made from simple ingredients really are. So that led me to writing about interesting people and fascinating food and weaving those together through all of these books.”
While living in Ames, when John joined the faculty at Iowa State University, Eighmey started doing collaborative work with Farm Progress, the publisher of 22 farming and ranching magazines. She said she wrote books specific to their publications that are annotated with stories about the people she met as she gathered the recipes for wonderful foods that tell the story.
