By ANN HINCH
Associate Editor

DUBLIN, Ind. — If you’ve ever thought about eating your way through the annual Historic National Road Yard Sale, you could follow Patricia McDaniel’s example.

The owner of The Old Storefront antiques shop on U.S. Highway 40 (the Historic National Road) and self-professed originator of the annual multistate yard sale, McDaniel has traversed 40 and its side roads several times to promote the sale throughout the six states from Maryland to St. Louis. She’s set rules for her travel, including: no cell phone, no radio or other media playing while she’s driving – and no eating in chain restaurants.

As such, she’s dined in a great number of bed-and-breakfasts and local joints. “I got hooked on regional stuff,” she explained of her decision a few years ago to publish a cookbook in conjunction with the sale. “Everybody likes to cook, and I wanted people to know more about 40.”

The Historic National Road Yard Sale Cookbook – for which she is now collecting recipes for a third volume – is divided into a section for each state. She only accepts regional-appropriate contributions that can be made with ingredients from that state. A crab salad recipe from Illinois last year was turned down because crab isn’t an Illinois staple; however, she would consider a novel recipe to prepare catfish, from the Midwest.

McDaniel tries to publish unique recipes, about 350 per year. She’s not looking for yet another chili recipe; however, if you were to submit an unusual variation (rabbit chili, perhaps?), yours might be chosen. Recipes for which your state is known are also viable contenders, such as the sugar cream pie recipe she published from an Indiana baker. Other memorable entries have included a mashed potato sandwich and specific directions for cooking possum.
(Note: If you know how to cook fern fronds, especially in the style of Jungle Jim’s International Market of Hamilton, Ohio, not only will you probably be published, you may well gain a new best friend in McDaniel.)

But what really seems to interest her is if a recipe is from a restaurant or other food business – especially one no longer in operation. She has convinced some actively-operating eateries to share their recipes, too; when asked why a business would do such a thing, she explained it’s unlikely they’re giving away all their secrets for a cookbook, those little hidden tips and tidbits that make a dish unique as it’s served at the restaurant itself.

“If you share a recipe, you’re not necessarily going to get that (same) pancake that you would get in a restaurant,” she pointed out.

The slant of her first cookbook, published in 2009, focused chiefly on Indiana; last year’s pet state was Ohio, as McDaniel said she’s received much support from people and businesses there for promoting the book and the yard sale. This year’s focus will be on Maryland – but the book will still feature other states’ recipes.

Though the book is in some local libraries but generally available for sale only through McDaniel herself (since bookstores want their cut of any sale), there is one bookshop she promotes heavily. She enjoys telling the story of how she once participated in a book-signing alongside well-known scribe Nora Roberts in Boonsboro, Md., at the Turn the Page Bookstore & Café.

Yard sales next week

While the cookbook and yard sale both sprang from the same person, the yard sale effort, unlike the book’s sections, is not centrally organized. The yard sale is more of a suggestion to towns and cities along Highway 40, that if their businesses and residents want to participate by having individual sales or events, that five days is when people interested in antiques and other old treasures will be out and about scouting for them.

“I hate organizations,” McDaniel said, “so this is very loosely woven.”
She does admit, however, to an organized effort on her part to promote the yard sale through the states in which it meanders. Her 30-plus years of antiques business experience, combined with degrees in recreation, English and history, have helped her know how to do the necessary research and make the necessary contacts.

This year’s Historic National Road Yard Sale is June 1-5; it always starts the Wednesday after Memorial Day and runs through the following Sunday, so as not to compete with the holiday or the Indy 500. You want to take part by setting up a yard or garage sale along 40? You don’t want to wait until next Wednesday to start, or you can’t start yours until next Friday?

Well – just do it your way, advises McDaniel. Don’t call her for permission; like she said, she dislikes committees. “I was enough of a product of the Sixties that I didn’t like a lot of the status quo,” she said, of planning something down to the most minute detail.

Other experiences influenced her feelings about formal organization and travel, including trips with her mother and aunt as a child in which the women would stop at “horrible tourist traps.” Possessed of a strongly independent personality, McDaniel doesn’t like to plan much beyond knowing where she’ll be sleeping for the night – “Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m going to do until I get going,” she said.

And, she’s even flexible about that. She relates many stories of meeting people during her road trips promoting the yard sale, who invite her and her faithful dog Lilly into their businesses and homes for meals, to stay the night gratis and to come back for a visit the next time she’s in the area.

Volume 2 of the cookbook even opens with a semi-humorous magazine-style quiz that tests the reader’s adventurousness with questions based on her travels, such as asking if the reader would agree with: “You would never consider setting your alarm an hour or two early and then meandering down the streets of Brownsville, Pa., as the community begins to awaken.”

The yard sale began on an unspoken dare. Years ago, she said a rival in nearby Cambridge City bragged she was starting an antiques fair, so McDaniel wanted to top her somehow. She came up with the lengthy yard sale, which in 2004 only covered towns from Richmond to Knightstown, Ind. The second year, she said it stretched west to Terre Haute; its third year – which she said was the Bicentennial of the Historic National Road – saw it leapfrog to its current 800-plus-mile distance from Baltimore to St. Louis.

“Their antique fair has gone by the wayside,” McDaniel said with a grin over lunch at the Silver Dollar Lounge in Cambridge City, “and (my effort) is going full blast.”

McDaniel is still selling copies of last year’s cookbook for $16.95 plus shipping, and will be collecting recipes for the third until Aug. 10. To reach her, call 765-478-4809, visit her website at www.oldstorefrontantiques.com or email info@oldstorefrontantiques.com