Cookbook captures taste of NASCAR, down home style (cont'd)

When Gordon moved from Indiana to North Carolina, the only way his mother could come visit was if Carol brought a pan of lasagna with her.

"He was always a good eater," she said. "Oh, this is funny. Whenever we would go out to eat he would always order the most expensive thing on the menu thinking it meant he would get the most food. He was about 10 or 12 years old."

Gordon was often disappointed when the dollar amount didn't match the portion size.

Stories like this are sprinkled throughout the cookbook at the top of many of the recipes that are either marked C for Carol or M for Martha. Although I'm not sure Martha shared the wedding night story about her raw chicken.

"The day we got married we stayed at my sister's house that night," Martha recalled. "My mother gave me some prime pieces of chicken to fry for my husband. Well, my sister had a gas stove, I had never used one."

Martha had learned to cook on a wood stove and proceeded to fry the chicken breasts.

"They were real pretty and brown. But it wasn't done on the inside," she laughed. "That was sort of an embarrassment."

Martha said in the 1930s and 1940s women didn't always have cookbooks handy to guide them.

"You cooked and learned by taste," she said.

And as one of 12 children, Martha said she learned her way around a kitchen rather quickly, but she never imagined she would compile decades of recipe cards scattered amongst her friends and family for a cookbook.

Neither did Carol, but the experience was one that rekindled special childhood memories for her. Carol didn't have a lot of her mother's recipes committed to memory, but when she told her brother and sister-in-law she was doing a cookbook they told her they had some of the old recipe cards in the attic.

"My mom died in 1974 so it was neat to see her handwriting again," Carol said. "One of the things I learned doing this cookbook is that you never have time to stop and reflect on what you have done in your life. This cookbook gave me an opportunity to go back and see those traditions that I grew up with are still with me today."

In the cookbook, both Earnhardt Jr. and Gordon write forewords but Gordon captured the essence of the book best: "As a driver I know all about life racing by at a crazy pace, and I can promise you that the foods you'll find in the cookbook are worth slowing down to taste."