Staff Reports

    Cookbooks featuring recipes from generations of former telephone company workers will be on sale again for the holiday season.

    Donna Jill Johnson, Lauderdale County Circuit Clerk and a former telephone company employee, said the the Telephone Pioneer’s annual Bell’s Best Cookbook Sale is Dec. 2-6 and will be held at 2310 7th St., which is the AT&T building that is across from the City Hall Christmas tree. The sale will be held each day, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

    “These are southern family recipes from years ago that the Mississippi chapter started,” Johnson said. “When my sister lost everything to (Hurricane) Katrina, the first thing she wanted for her FEMA trailer was a Bell cookbook.”

    Among Johnson’s recipes published in the cookbook is one of her grandmother’s for Banana Nut Bread.

    The original “Bell’s Best” was printed in 1981 with over 500,000 in print with recipes submitted from telephone company employees.

    “No one could ever imagine the success of these great family southern recipes to be shared today through the Telephone Pioneers,” Johnson said.

    All of the Bell’s Best cookbooks will be available as well as other state’s pioneer cookbooks from Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Georgia. A top seller last year was the “Going Wild”  with recipes for cooking wild game. There will also be RADA knives and accessories for sale.

    Spiral bound cookbooks are $15; others are $12; and the “Going Wild” cookbooks are $5. Proceeds from the sale benefit local charities like Relay for Life, Feed by Faith, Wounded Warriors of Mississippi, the VA in Koscuisko, and others. For additional information call  601-483-5448 or 601-917-3727.