A well-known and well-loved Pennsylvania ingredient — Hershey’s Chocolate — has the honor of being featured in the first recipe column in Penn Lines history.

The magazine’s first issue — way back in October 1966 — didn’t feature any recipes, but the second issue a month later included some from the iconic company founded by Pennsylvanian Milton S. Hershey. That started a tradition that continues today.

Lots of cooks in the kitchen

Throughout its 60-year history, Penn Lines has worked to stay relevant to its readers. That means some things have changed dramatically, while others have retained similarities to their original look. A trip through the archives reveals “Cooperative Kitchen,” the magazine’s monthly recipe column, falls somewhere in the middle.

Early columns were often provided by Penn State Extension or state Department of Agriculture sources, and many recipes focused on the specific interests of rural readers, such as the best ways to cook wild game. There were recipes of general interest, too, including ones to create tasty, homemade Christmas gifts.

In 1972, “Recipes” began to be listed in the Penn Lines’ table of contents, signaling they were going to be a regular monthly feature moving forward. In 1975 and for several years afterward, recipes were included in a section known as “Woman to Woman.” In possible recognition that men also cooked, the name was eventually changed to “Country Kitchen” (sometimes spelled Kountry Kitchen). When the magazine was redesigned in 2022, the name changed to “Cooperative Kitchen.”

In the mid-1980s, recipes were reprinted from cookbooks published by the Pennsylvania Rural Electric Association (PREA), the statewide advocate for cooperatives. Anita Leitzel Stambaugh, now retired from PREA, was one of the earliest staffers to coordinate the column, selecting recipes and writing the accompanying text. She still finds humor in those responsibilities, she says, because she’s the last person who would claim to be a “cook.” The duties then shifted to staff members David Scardena and John Drexler, who wrote the column throughout most of the 1990s.

In a move away from staff-driven recipe columnists, the magazine started bringing on a series of long-term contributors, including the late Linda Allison-Lewis, a restaurant critic and author of several cookbooks; Kitty Halke-Staley, who billed herself as a “cooking professional”; and Janette Hess, a freelance writer and Master Food Volunteer who led food classes and judged fair entries through the cooperative extension.

Hess continued to contribute her original recipes to Penn Lines before retiring in 2020. “I never met a recipe I didn’t mess with,” she says.

Today, Anne Kirchner whips up the “Cooperative Kitchen” column for Penn Lines by leaning into her two professional interests: cooking and writing. She wrote a cookbook, owned a restaurant, managed a demonstration kitchen and taught cooking classes before becoming a Penn Lines contributor.

Kirchner enjoys experimenting with flavors and considers cooking to be an art that extends to how it’s plated. She finds inspiration in old family recipes and cookbooks and is open to reader suggestions, which can be emailed to editor@prea.com.
 

Winning the popularity contest

Still a regular reader of “Cooperative Kitchen,” Leitzel Stambaugh says she has noticed a greater focus on nutrition and healthy cooking.

“Early recipes would often use lard, which you seldom see anymore,” she says. “More of the earlier recipes also used wild game, such as venison, and we had some that used bear meat and even had one for squirrel potpie.”

One thing that has not changed is reader interest in the column. Penn Lines Editor Jill Ercolino says that in reader surveys, the column has traditionally been — and continues to be — one of the most-read sections of the magazine.

“Readers may skip the feature story,” she says, “but nobody skips dessert.”

As proof of that, here are two of the Hershey’s Chocolate recipes that appeared in the November 1966 issue of Penn Lines:

Also in this issue