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The way to cook Aunt Rosie Deaton's All-American Slum-Gullion, according to the most surprising cookbook to come along in a month of Sundays, is to ''Simmer til you can't stand it any more, then take it off the fire and dive in.''
The book is ''White Trash Cooking'' by Ernest Matthew Mickler, with 30 pages of photographs right out of ''Tobacco Road'' and with recipes for cooter pie, okra omelet and potato-chip sandwiches. Although an unlikely candidate for success, except perhaps in the Deep South, it is currently one of the fastest-selling books on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.
''It's easily our best-selling cookbook, and at times it's even our best-selling book,'' said Jeannette Watson, owner of Books & Co., on Madison Avenue.
The irony is New York publishers initially declined to buy the manuscript unless the author changed the title to ''Poor Southern Cooking'' or something similarly innocuous. When Mr. Mickler refused, the Jargon Society of Winston-Salem, N.C., gave him a $1,000 advance and ordered a modest 5,000-copy first printing. 185,000 Copies in Print Soon What happened next has helped put Mr. Mickler squarely in the catbird seat.
Aided by endorsements from Helen Hayes and J. William Fulbright, the book caught on so quickly that there will soon be 185,000 copies in print. And the 46-year-old author - who for years worked at not very glamorous jobs ''just to keep myself alive'' -has been able to quit his job as a caterer, has acquired a New York literary agent and has plans for at least two more books. Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, Calif., recently paid what amounted to $150,000 for the book in an auction that included five New York publishers - including some that turned it down initially.
Continue reading the main storyMoreover, the initial payment, an advance against royalties of 15 percent, may turn out to be only a down payment if the $12.95 book continues to sell at anywhere near its present rate. While it is doing well enough in bookstores to have gotten onto several regional best-seller lists, it is doing equally well in gift shops, gourmet food shops and other outlets that do not normally carry books.
''We have sold many hundreds of copies,'' said Patricia Woo, owner of the two Tricia Woo gift shops in St. Louis. ''Even when we had only one display copy, people were signing up to buy it.''
Booksellers cite several reasons for the success of ''White Trash,'' including these:
* Its eye-catching cover, graced -if that's the word - by the photograph of a plump woman, anything but a Southern belle, whom the author saw sitting on the back of a pickup truck on a dusty Alabama road.
* Its down-home literary style. Examples: hush puppies got their name, the author writes, because, ''If you throw these to the dogs, it'll hush 'em up.'' Reba's Rainbow Ice-Box Cake, he says, is ''excellent for Tupperware parties.'' Mammy's Fruit Cakes are so heavy ''the post office won't take them.'' Be sure to eat Kitchen Sink Tomato Sandwiches over the sink ''while the juice runs down your elbows.''
* Finally, there are the 240 recipes themselves - Southern culinary treasures prepared with generous amounts of salt meat, cornmeal and molasses, the three ingredients the author says set ''White Trash cooking aside from other kinds of cooking.'' 'Authentic People's Food'
''It's all authentic people's food, in the language that the people gave the recipes to me,'' said the author, who collected more than 1,000 of them from people living in trailer camps, shacks and towns with names like Eclectic, Ala., Evening Shade, Ark., Sandfly, Ga., and Maurice, La. Mr. Mickler said he omitted recipes for grits both because the book became too long and because he decided to save those recipes for his next book.
While Mr. Mickler was autographing books in Chapel Hill, N.C., recently, an elderly blue-haired woman told him she loved the book but she scolded him for leaving out the baking soda in the recipe for corn bread. The author, whose accent resembles that of Andy Griffith, fixed her with a long look and, with just the hint of a smile, replied, ''Lady, if I wanted a fluffy cake recipe I'd have put it in there.''
Born at the edge of the swamps of northern Florida, Mr. Mickler said, he ''was raised without electricity until I was 18.'' He acquired his appreciation for food from his mother, who, when she wasn't pumping gas at her Edna Rae's Grocery Store, was cooking up ''a big dinner of fried chitlins, a mess of turnip greens, enough hoe cakes for a Bible story, a wash pot full of swamp cabbage stew and two large Our Lord's Scripture cakes.''
After Jacksonville University, Mr. Mickler earned a master of fine arts from Mills College in Oakland, Calif., then spent several years in an art community in Mexico, where he assembled his book before returning to Florida.
In the book and in conversation, Mr. Mickler makes a distinction between white trash and White Trash, pointing out that the former have little in the way of pride and manners, whereas the latter are well endowed with both. He wears the White Trash label, which he says is cultural rather than economic, with considerable pride.
Other Southerners share his sentiments. The author Harper Lee, for example, lauded the book as a valuable ''sociological document,'' describing it as ''a beautiful testament to a stubborn people of proud and poignant heritage.'' Magazine Rejected Book Ad
While working as a caterer in Key West, Fla., Mr. Mickler repeatedly asked guests if they knew anyone in publishing. One guest, Anthony G. Woolcott, a British publisher, knew Jonathan Williams, founder of the Jargon Society, a nonprofit press that specializes in publishing poetry and photography books. Mr. Williams was so bowled over by the book that he offered Mr. Mickler a contract.
''The problem was, we depend on grants and contributions to publish our books, so we had to borrow the money to publish the Mickler book,'' said Tom Patterson, executive director of the Jargon Society. But a 5,000-copy first printing sold out quickly, another 5,000-copy printing sold out soon afterward and the book was off and running.
Mr. Patterson said the Jargon Society tried to put an ad in The New Yorker but the check for more than $900 and the camera-ready copy were returned. ''A week or so later somone with the magazine told me that the higher-ups didn't like the title,'' he said. (A spokesman for the magazine said the ad was rejected because ''we thought the title might offend our readers.'') Some people are still turned off by the title. ''Two sisters came in and saw the book,'' recalled Ms. Woo in St. Louis. ''One of them thought it was the funniest thing she ever saw, the other was terribly offended.''
Philip Wood, president of Ten Speed Press, was himself somewhat uncomfortable with a title he felt was derogatory. But he tried the book out on friends and acquaintances during a trip through rural Louisiana, and when the reaction was uniformly positive Ten Speed entered its first auction.
''I don't know how long interest in the book will last,'' Mr. Wood said, ''but I'm proud to have it. It's a work of genius, created by one person from scratch.''
Meanwhile, the author is gearing up for a book tour of such Northern culinary bastions as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Minneapolis, presumably to sing the praises of chicken feet and rice, Mary Beth Boney's Collard Greens - and, of course, cooter pie, the instructions for which say ''drop live cooter in a pot of boiling water.''
For the uninformed, the author has thoughtfully noted in parenthesis that a cooter is a turtle.
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