ETA 11/20/08: My heart breaks to report this but I just learned that Lori Hall Steele passed away last night. My deepest sympathies to her young son, mother, and extended family and friends.

Ok, ok … I know this is a food blog, but I’m a food writer by trade, a freelance one at that. And I’m here to ask for your help. (This is what I blogged over at my writing website, The Renegade Writer, today.)

I’m not a big reader of essays, but earlier this year I was pointed to an essay at the Washington Post written by Lori Hall Steele, a freelance writer I know from Freelance Success. By the end of her essay, my heart felt as if it were going to break in two. Go ahead. Read it. I’ll be curious what you think. And don’t read any more of my post until you go read it.

Ok now. Here’s the deal. A few months ago, I was stunned to learn that Lori had been diagnosed with a particularly brutal case of Lyme Disease. She couldn’t work, and when you don’t work as a freelancer, you don’t get money and you can’t pay bills. Her friends in Michigan held a benefit for her. I thought things might get better, but recently I found out they were only getting worse. Her doctors were now leaning toward a diagnosis of ALS, or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, a progressive neurodegenerative illness.

Lori’s financial resources are exhausted. She’s gotten funding from ASJA (the American Society of Journalists and Authors) and just got another emergency grant from them, but it’s not enough. (You can read more detail about Lori’s plight here.) She’s days away from losing her home. At this point, Lori not only can’t work, she’s bedridden and using a ventilator to breathe.

I wracked my brain trying to figure out a way to raise more money so that Lori doesn’t have to worry about losing her home, not when she’s fighting for her life. My suggestion was a blog-a-thon, which I’m starting here. Below is a PayPal button where you can donate directly to Lori. Please please please click on it and give generously. (There’s also a button on the blog started by Lori’s friends in Michigan.) If you blog, consider adding this button to your site and blogging a bit about Lori … let’s spread the word and see what we can do for her and her son. Right after I post this, I’m going to write to every writing blogger I can think of. I know that the power of virtual communities can do good things. My heart breaks thinking about Lori’s words in her Washington Post piece:

“I tell him I’ll always be here for him, one way or another. Always always always. Just like my mother is here for me. Just like I was there when he was 3. It is an impossible promise, a gamble with his trust. I secretly pray I don’t let him down, not on this.”

Please, give what you can spare. $25 is a week’s worth of fancy coffee drinks for some of us. I know times are tight — they are around here — but they’re nowhere near as bad as they are for other folks.

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Before Ina and Nigella, before Martha or even Julia, there was Elsie.

A former medical secretary, Elsie Masterton and her attorney husband John left New York in the 1940s to cleave a ski area from Vermont’s Green Mountains. While John and his workers felled trees and packed snow (if there was any — this was before the advent of snow guns and grooming machines), Elsie taught herself to cook, a practical necessity since it became her job to feed an army of hungry men every day.

The ski area didn’t pan out, but Elsie’s newfound cooking talents saved the enterprise. With the last of their savings, the Mastertons transformed their 19th century farmhouse into the Blueberry Hill Inn, with Elsie presiding in the kitchen. A small ad in the Saturday Review promised visitors “Lucullan food,” and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, guests from around the world sojourned in Brandon, Vermont, to feast on Elsie Masterton’s shrimp tempura, her famous chicken baked in wine, and her homey, bite-sized biscuits. Her fame grew with the publication of the Blueberry Hill Cookbook in 1959, the Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook in 1963, then the Blueberry Hill Kitchen Notebook in 1964, in addition to two nonfiction books about the Mastertons’ lives as country innkeepers.

Masterton balked when her publisher asked for a cookbook that merely catalogued the inn’s recipes. She convinced them that women wanted and needed a cookbook with spice and personality. In the Blueberry Hill Cookbook she wrote, “I think that I am talking with someone; let’s let it be you. You are a gal in my kitchen, at my elbow. I want you to know what I’m doing, every single thing I’m doing, and as often as this is practical, why I’m doing it.” The headnotes in her recipes share amusing stories about her children, guests, and the local school board, impart practical kitchen wisdom, or guilelessly gush over how delicious the dish is. Masterton’s engaging writing style won over not only American housewives, but earned her accolades from First Lady Bess Truman and poet Ogden Nash. An unattributed endorsement on her last cookbook reads, “I read and devoured [the Blueberry Hill Cookbook] like a novel from cover to cover.”

In a day when convenience food became the norm, Masterton fought the good fight: “I disclaim all knowledge of a way of fixing any canned vegetables other than onions and beets,” she wrote. She preached respect for ingredients, instructed readers to make friends with their butchers, and showed them there was life beyond the canned vegetable aisle when they grew their own vegetables or shopped at roadside stands. And although she quaintly refers to women as gals and chooses margarine (the fat of the day) over butter in her recipes, Masterton’s cookbooks are relevant nearly a half-century later. Today she’d be an enthusiastic supporter of CSAs and farmers’ markets, if not a card-carrying member of Slow Food USA.

When Elsie Masterton died of cancer in 1966, mere months after her husband passed away, so did one of our earliest good food advocates. Masterton’s cookbooks are out of print, but can occasionally be found in used bookshops. Signed copies can fetch $25 or $30, and the boxed set of her cookbooks has gone for as much as $90 on eBay. And she still has her fans: on eGullet, an online community for foodies, Masterton’s books were cited when someone posed the question about what cookbooks members most liked to curl up with and read.

Tony Clark, who bought the Blueberry Hill Inn from the Masterton estate in 1968, says he gets the occasional letter asking if Elsie is still around. In a way, she is. The youngest of her three daughters, Laurey Masterton, has run Laurey’s Catering and Gourmet-to-go in Asheville, North Carolina, for 20 years.

“People are always coming in here, telling me how much they loved my mother’s books,” says Laurey, who was 12 when her parents died. “Then they look at me and tell me how much I look like her. I’m very proud to be her daughter.” Several years ago, she reprinted the Blueberry Hill Cookbook, and in February 2007, she published a memoir, Elsie’s Biscuits: Simple Stories of Me, My Mother, and Food ($19.95). “It’s really about me honoring my mother,” says Laurey. “I wish she could see what she showed me and what I have now.”

Laurey feels closest to her mother when she’s making her biscuits; it was her job as a child to line them up on the baking sheets after her mother cut them out with a makeshift biscuit cutter. Today Laurey uses her mother’s recipe in her shop. When one customer learned there was sour cream in the recipe, he declared, “Them’s Yankee biscuits.” He went on to devour them.

Yankee biscuits they may be, but with Elsie’s touch they transcend time and cultural boundaries.

Elsie’s Biscuits can be purchased from Laurey’s Catering and Gourmet-to-go or Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café in Asheville, NC, phone 828-254-6734.

Elsie’s Biscuits

Adapted from The Blueberry Hill Cookbook by Elise Masterton
Yield: 30 1-inch biscuits or 10 3-inch biscuits

To preserve the soft, flaky architecture that’s the hallmark of a well-executed biscuit, use a light touch when patting out the dough and don’t twist your biscuit cutter – simply push it into the dough and pull it straight up to release the circle. Elsie cut her biscuits into bite-sized 1-inch circles. If you don’t have a 1-inch cutter, cut the dough into 1-inch squares or use a standard 3-inch biscuit cutter. According to Elsie’s daughter Laurey, a handful of chopped ham and Vermont cheddar makes a fine addition.

3 cups flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon sugar
4-oz (1 stick) butter, cut into 8 pieces
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup sour cream
1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract
Flour, for sprinkling

1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a large bowl.

3. Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut the butter into the flour until the mixture looks like cornmeal. In a small bowl, stir together the milk, buttermilk, sour cream, and vanilla extract. Pour the liquid into the flour mixture and stir until just combined.

4. Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Gently pat the dough out until it’s 1/2-inch thick. Press a biscuit cutter firmly into dough without twisting, and place biscuits on baking sheet.

5. Bake 1-inch biscuits for 7 to 8 minutes. If using a standard size biscuit cutter, bake for 11 to 12 minutes. Serve warm.