Cookbook captures taste of NASCAR, down home style

Inside Martha Earnhardt's kitchen is a cast-iron frying pan seasoned to perfection and cured from the many cakes of cornbread.

More than 60 years old, the pan has been used so many times that at one point Martha wore the handle clean off the iron.

"My husband had to weld it back on," laughed Martha, widow of Ralph Earnhardt, mother of Dale Earnhardt and grandmother of Dale Earnhardt Jr. "That had to be more than 35 years ago, but I still use it today. That pan was one of the first cooking utensils Ralph and I got as a married couple; I was only 17 years old."

The single pan holds a tremendous amount of memories for Martha and symbolizes a time where home-cooked, family meals took precedent over dining out. Her family enjoyed a simple meat-and-potato style menu, no frills, until Dale began traveling the country, race track to race track.

"Dale introduced me to a few things I had never eaten before once he started racing," she recalled. "Artichokes, I still don't know how to cook them and I wouldn't know what they look like at the grocery to start with."

Nevertheless, Martha has learned to cook some of the finest Southern delicacies known to the region including her Sun Drop cake. She is sharing some of her most cherished family recipes in a book the Earnhardt matriarch co-authored with another well-known NASCAR mom: Carol Gordon Bickford, Jeff Gordon's mother.

The cookbook, Pit Stop in a Southern Kitchen: Two Moms of Racing Legends Serve Up Stories & Recipes, is a collaboration of California and Carolina cookery spread over 200 pages mixed with a heap of anecdotes from the kitchens of these two culinary goddesses.

Both women learned to cook from their respective mothers but over the years developed their own equally delicious styles. Martha swears by fatback while Carol calls for extra virgin olive oil.

"Before we moved from California to Indiana salad bars were a big deal and healthy living was becoming more popular. I used to cook fried chicken and four-course meals a lot, but people just don't eat like that anymore. And when you're racing you barely have time to sit down to a home-cooked meal, anyway."

When time did allow, Jeff always demanded lasagna, Carol's marquee recipe in the cookbook.

"I put sour cream in the sauce," she said. "It certainly adds to the calorie intake in the dish but it does something to the sausage and I use a lot of mushrooms." (Continued)