ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 16, 1996 TAG: 9604160044
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Every last body on his earth has a particular notion of paradise, and this was hers, standing in the murderously hot back kitchen of her own house, concocting and contriving, leaning forward and squinting at the fine print of the cookery book, a clean wooden spoon in hand.
- Carol Shields, ``The Stone Diaries''
Lucille Iantosca doesn't have any regrets.
At 66, she looks back on her life as a homemaker with the utmost pride.
She knows she's among the last of a vanishing breed: A 1990 study reported that only one out of 10 American households consists of a man who works outside the home and a woman who stays home to care for the house and children.
By the year 2000, it's estimated that 61 percent of all new entrants into the paid work force will be women.
Lucille doesn't look down her nose at women who have to work, but she admires those who can afford to stay home full time - raising their children, preparing meals, taking care of their husbands, their homes and themselves.
A glimpse of her bookshelves shows the evolution of the American homemaker - and Lucille herself.
Lucille's house in eastern Roanoke County is literally walled with cookbooks, more than 2,000 of them. Collecting them - mainly from second-hand shops, garage sales and Sam's Wholesale Club - has been her hobby and passion for more than 25 years.
Her very first cookbook, ``The Settlement Cookbook: The Way to a Man's Heart,'' was a circa-1948 collection given to her as a wedding-shower gift. For the next 15 years, it was the only cookbook she owned.
Tragically, her husband didn't live to taste many of its selections. At 23 - when their youngest child was just 6 months old - he was killed in a car accident.
For the next 14 years, Lucille was a single parent - before such a term was even coined. A New Yorker at the time, her elderly parents helped raise her children; her mother did most of the cooking. She remembers mowing the lawn between work shifts at a local bank, ironing and starching her children's sunsuits - and selling Tupperware on the side.
``You're so busy doing what you have to do, you don't stop and analyze it; you just do it,'' she recalls.
About the time she met her second husband, Michael, a next-door neighbor piqued her interest in cooking and cookbooks. Lucille was 38 at the time; her children, teen-agers. And Mike, she recalls, ``was truly a bachelor. He still doesn't know a thing about the kitchen, except to eat in it.''
It didn't matter. Lucille relished her role as cook and home economist. She collected celebrity cookbooks by Mike Douglas, Sophia Loren and Pilar Wayne (John Wayne's wife - ``she's a fabulous cook''). She has a half-dozen books dedicated to the subject of garlic, which she buys in bulk, three pounds at a time.
She searched out regional, spiral-bound cookbooks from Texas to Maine. ``The small books put out by organizations and clubs are the best,'' she says. ``They have recipes by people who are not going to give out a bad recipe - they don't want the reputation of being known as a bad cook.''
She has so many cookbooks and so many recipes, she keeps an index of her own collection for easy reference. She also writes down everything she makes, as well as everything she eats in restaurants - taking careful notes on the quality of each.
For Christmas last year, she filled a blank book with recipes for her daughter. ``Because she kept calling me long-distance for recipes.''
Lucille believes in the value of squeezing a dime. She recalls standing in line at the bank once - to deposit 50 cents. ``I bought a car with that money later on.''
She never buys precut chicken - too expensive. She always wraps her bananas in a plastic bag - so they keep twice as long. She gravitates toward recipes that are simple because ``they're not trying to show you how gourmet they are by calling for a dozen ingredients.''
She's learned a lot more than recipes by reading cookbooks. Depression cookbooks taught her tricks for stretching ingredients. Her copy of ``The First Ladies Cookbook'' gives the real history of how the presidents' families lived, from the Washingtons to the Johnsons. Though she doesn't own any of Martha Stewart's cookbooks - too expensive - ``I wish I would have had her ideas at her age.''
She worries about the rush-rush, stressed-out state of most women today. ``Nobody ever eats at home together any more,'' she says. When she served what she considered to be an everyday meal - stuffed pork chops, brown-rice casserole and yellow squash - to dinner guests recently, they said, ``You mean you eat this way every night?''
``What people are making and earning, they throw away in fast food places,'' she says. ``They don't take the time to eat well. I see a lot of people eating in their cars.''
People make themselves too busy to adequately nourish themselves and their families, she believes. ``But you can only be as busy as you wanna be.''
She admires people who are foregoing materialism for simplicity, trying to make their home a haven. ``Taking charge of your life is what it's all about,'' she says. ``If you go with the flow, you turn around and your life's gone - and a lot of the pleasures, too.''
As for her own life, she says, ``I wouldn't change a thing. All I really wanted was a family and to grow up with them.''
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II/Staff. Lucille Iantosca has collectedby CNBmore than 2,000 cookbooks. color.