Community Cookbooks Research Articles

Constructing Culinary Knowledge

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period rife with social change for both the domains of food production and consumption, with significant consequences for how we know food today. Yet the ways in which culinary knowledge became standardized beyond cooking schools and commercial cookbooks remains largely undisclosed, particularly in rural households. Much of the existing cookbook literature relies on cookbooks that originate from urban locations. To explore how knowledge about food at the household and community level changed during this time, this article examines rural community cookbooks published in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan between 1893 and 1956. The findings suggest that contributors embraced the changing food landscape, as reflected in their enthusiastic adoption of processed products, but their culinary knowledge may have differed from that of their urban counterparts due to a lack of access to markets or affordable ingredients combined with continued reliance on local food environments.

Cooking Up Change: Family Cookbooks as Markers of Shifting Kitchen Politics

Despite the recent academic attention community cookbooks have finally been granted, little has been said about compiled family cookbooks. Even works such as Janet Theophano's Eat My Words, Andrea Eidinger’s "Gefilte Fish and Roast Duck with Orange Slices": A Treasure for My Daughter and the Creation of a Jewish Cultural Orthodoxy in Postwar Montreal” and Marie Drews’ examination of In Memory's Kitchen, are about works by, and for, an entire community rather than for family. Furthermore, though gender critics have long documented the imbalance of food-related work in the home by showing that women have always been the primary food makers, one cannot deny that the makeup of modern families has changed and that men and children are becoming more active in the kitchen. Drawing on past and current literature to analyse a family cookbook I made and gave to my cousin for her wedding, this essay draws academic attention to family cookbooks and family food practices. While the cookbook I analyse is predominantly feminine, the many male and child voices included in this collection, voices that are usually excluded from such works, prove that, when given a chance, these often silenced groups can, and do, impact a family's food habits.

Living the good life: community cookbooks as an expression of Australian lifestyles and values

Community cookbooks are a distinctive subgenre of cookery texts, consisting of the compiled recipes of individuals, sold in aid of community causes. Since their origins in the late nineteenth century they have been accruing as primary textual evidence of Australian lifestyles. They depict regional variations in what people ate and how they prepared it, as well as giving some insight into a few truly trans-regional, ‘Australian’ tastes and dishes. They show something of how Australians liked to spend their time; the organisations they chose to support; and their conception of food, cooking and eating as a part of community life and family life. Viewed collectively, community cookbooks offer a broad insight into the civic and culinary activities of ‘ordinary people’ across the nation. This article will give an overview of how this special variety of cookbook has contributed to the building of ‘Australian’ ideals of lifestyle and community: through explicit participation in dialogues of nationhood; through contribution to a wide variety of civic projects which were integral to twentieth-century nation-building; and through their important role in the development of shared social and culinary norms.

Souvlakia’s journey: a Greek-Australian food odyssey

From the days of the gold rushes, migrants have brought to Australian tables foods from all over the world. Amid the smorgasbord of dishes from Italy, China, and India, however, Greek cuisine is underrepresented. Even today, Greek dishes are less likely than pizza or Asian stir fry to be cooked in Australian kitchens and Greek restaurants are less prevalent than those of other ethnic communities. This article uses cookbooks of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to chart the relatively slow progress of Greek cuisine across the Australian culinary landscape, and community cookbooks, personal recipe books and personal interviews to provide further insights about the meaning of ‘Greek food’ and about the real impact of Greek cooks on Australian cooking. The influence of Greek cuisine may be less obvious than that of Chinese and Italian cuisine, but it is evident in methods of preparation, rituals of consumption, the use of lemon juice and olive oil, and the desire for simple fresh ingredients – these factors comprise the essence of true Greek food.

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Community Cookbooks in the Prairies

This article will build upon research I undertook in co-curating Culinaria: Early 20th-Century Cookbooks in the Prairies, an online exhibit beginning in late spring 2013 at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Beginning with a personal account illustrating the real-life sharing of recipes that has occurred in the Prairies between cultural groups, this article will trace such sharing in Prairies community cookbooks. As all Prairies settlers dealt with the same relative isolation and limited ingredients, neighbours of differing ethnic groups adapted and exchanged recipes that worked in the Prairies climate. French community cookbooks contain recipes for chop suey (an influence from the Chinese restaurants in nearly every Prairie small town), German community cookbooks contain recipes for cabbage rolls, Ukrainian community cookbooks contain recipes for sauerkraut, and so on. Such sharing in fact enabled somewhat of a common culinary base unique to the Prairies: indeed chop suey, cabbage rolls, and sauerkraut appear in nearly every community cookbook, as do, for related reasons, rhubarb and saskatoon pies. Food and cookbook history in the Prairies has been little studied, presumably because the only real cookbooks published here in the first half of the twentieth century were community cookbooks (differentiating the Prairies situation from that of Ontario and Quebec), and these books largely survive only in private homes. This is gradually changing, as libraries begin to recognize the value of community cookbooks in reflecting, and contributing to, the culinary history of the Prairies.

Historical Cookbooks in the Study of American Religion

This study examines late Victorian era Protestant church community cookbooks as moral and cultural guides written by women for women (gendered texts), and examines the domestic roles and Christian practices of women in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century. For this project I used a sample of eleven Protestant community cookbooks published from 1881 to 1913 to serve as case studies, illuminating the late Victorian period through the words and recipes of the women who wrote them. As domestic guides, the cookbooks employ paratexts, presenting recipes for food and life in broader terms. Artwork and advertisements from the texts offer additional information about the connections between gender, domesticity and religion during the era.

Choice Receipts from American Housekeepers: A Collection of Digitized Community Cookbooks from the Library of Congress

Abstract This article looks at a collection of 110 community cookbooks from the Library of Congress and discusses how they were selected and scanned as part of a mass digitization project. The article considers why this set of long–overlooked books is important as a primary resource for those doing public history, as well as for anyone interested in local, culinary, and cultural history, or genealogy. Looking ahead, the article briefly describes a project to add content and provide cultural and historical context to the community cookbooks, by linking these scanned books with related Library of Congress materials.

Intensifying Taste, Intensifying Identity: Collectivity through Community Cookbooks

Community cookbooks have long served as organizational locations for women’s associations, church groups, and charity organizations in the United States. In creating communities, these textual associations implicitly rebuke a social order that devalues women’s work, authorize forms of communication and knowledge that have been ignored and suppressed, and bring into being collective forms of social, economic, and political identity. But understanding these communities as undermining norms of gender, as protesting domesticity and obeisance, or, alternatively, as liberating women from gender norms is to mistake world creation for resistance. Community cookbooks operate through the senses and the body as judgments about belonging; by creating and reprinting the socially gustative in book formats, they encourage a reading of communal political identities as more a matter of intensification of identity than defiance or domination.

A Peek Into Their Kitchens

Jewish community cookbooks in the postwar era offer a peek into the kitchens—or at least the imagined kitchens—of American Jews during a major turning point in history. They capture a range of conflicting social trends and negotiations of religious and cultural identity that in part characterized the period. Such diversity of practices and beliefs, even within one institution, community or synagogue, is particularly evident within the prolific, sometimes didactic, and often laissez-faire charitable cookbook genre of the postwar period. Given the unprecedented number of Jewish community cookbooks produced in the postwar era, they also offer historians unique access to women's lives and the choices they made in representing themselves and their communities in print. Yet what appears within the cookbook—the recipes, illustrations, and introductions— reveals nearly as much as what remains unsaid.

Climate Change and the Contemporary Evolution of Foodways

Climate Change and the Contemporary Evolution of Foodways

Cookbooks as Primary Sources for Writing History

Cookbooks are important primary sources for food historians, and every culinary manual has a unique publishing history, set within the national context of a country's publishing industry. This paper argues that it is necessary to consider a cookbook's publishing history to interpret the meaning between the covers and to assess the book's significance within the society. I draw on case studies from my recently published Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949 to show how bibliographical evidence can contribute to an understanding of a food culture, help evaluate the degree to which a text reflects kitchen practice, reveal important aspects of authorship (including pseudonyms), and illuminate the phenomenon of community cookbooks.

African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture Jennifer Sieck Anne L. Bower (ed.), African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 200 pp. Editor Anne L. Bower invites six scholars to bring a dish in the form of a chapter to African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Together they host a multi-course meal for readers hungry to learn about African American history and culture through the lens of food. The diversity of the dinner guests reflects the divergent disciplines to which African American culinary studies lends itself; experts around the table range from archaeologists to sociologists. The result is a recipe for a flavorful feast (and, notably, one attentive to presentation) that provides a solid foundation for exploring African American foodways. Bower, a retired English professor and author of Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, introduces the collection of essays by examining the role of food in the motion picture Soul Food, observing that the Sunday dinner table acts as a barometer for the status of the African American family in the film. Bowers extends the metaphor to show how African American food offers a mirror to history and culture. By studying the history (part one of the book) and representations (part two) of African American food, she contends that scholars gain new insights not only into history and culture, but also into issues of race, gender, [End Page 1193] economics and politics. Though not a cookbook, Bowers includes a recipe for "Chicken and Collard Green Crêpes with Béchamel Sauce" at the conclusion of her introduction, enjoining readers, too, to participate in African American foodways (11). The value of studying food to yield greater meaning than, as the ad slogan puts it, "it's what's for dinner," echoes throughout the book. The author of chapter four, Doris Witt, likens food to music as a site for cultural expression, but critiques the limited recognition food receives related to its role in shaping history. Recapitulated in almost every chapter is the way that food is yet another example of African Americans' use of material culture to retain individual and group identities in the face of oppression. Though the book testifies to a distinctiveness in African American food, it also emphasizes the fusion of cultures blended by African Americans—African, Native American, and European—and the resulting influence that permeates American cuisine today. Finally, women and men play important roles in African American foodways past and present; however, a number of essays pay special attention to women's access to power in relation to food. In chapter one, Robert L. Hall notes that African foodways predate Alfred Crosby's notion of the Columbian Exchange by "hundreds, if not thousands of years" (17). He provides extensive documentation of crop exchanges to inform his inquiry into the relationship between food and the transatlantic slave trade. By asking what Africans ate and brought with them to the Americas, he attempts to determine how "African all Americans are" (18). Hall, a professor of African American studies and history, argues that enslaved Africans integrated their cultures into white southern culture because of their knowledge of growing crops such as rice and their role in preparing food on the plantation. They also maintained what Charles W. Joyner describes as "African culinary grammars" in their own food preparations which were separate from whites (31). Food and identity remained symbolically linked during slavery, a connection that continues today. Hall's concluding contention is reminiscent of Albert Raboteau's groundbreaking work in Slave Religion: foodways provide another instance in which African Americans creatively preserve African culture within the context of the slavery. William C. Whit riffs on similar themes in chapter two from his perspective as a sociologist, touching on how enslaved cooks influenced the evolution of white southern food culture and, more broadly, how "subordinated [End Page 1194] people used their own knowledge systems of the environment they settled to reshape the terms of their domination" (49). In these ways and others, Whit sees "soul food," a term coined in the 1960s to describe African American cuisine, "as constitutive of, and an exemplary performance of...

Communal Cuisine, Community Cookbooks, 1877–1960. Virtual exhibit, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/learn/Exhibit/index.htm. Created and maintained by Merinda Kaye Hensley. University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewCommunal Cuisine, Community Cookbooks, 1877–1960. Virtual exhibit, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/learn/Exhibit/index.htm. Created and maintained by Merinda Kaye Hensley. University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign.Diana D. ShonrockDiana D. ShonrockIowa State University Search for more articles by this author Iowa State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 77, Number 3July 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/519407 Views: 12Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“Kiddies' Delight”

Children, as the key defining members of the traditional nuclear family unit, played a central role in traditional Australian ideas about home provisioning, home cooking and family food. As the objects of twentieth century “professional mothering,” children formed the primary focus of many women's time and effort; furthermore, as the future stewards of the Lucky Country much nation-building focused on those community institutions devoted to their care and development. As such, children and the idea and ideology of childhood are strong presences in Australian community cookbooks. Yet their presence in these books is not limited to such passive roles. Children appear in community cookbooks as recipe contributors, as consumers, as arbiters of good taste, and as budding literati. A genre embedded in the structures of community and family life, community cookbooks contain some unusual insights into Australian childhood.

Heating Up the Sources: Using Community Cookbooks in Historical Inquiry

AbstractEven after immigrant women had changed to American dress and began sending their children to public school, the last aspect of life to change was their foodways. One of the ways by which women could stay within their sphere and still find a public voice was through the compilation of a community cookbook that were compiled for the benefit of their churches and a myriad of community organizations. But they were far more than just collections of recipes. A careful examination of charity cookbooks shows how women defined their roles, disseminated hierarchy within their own groups, advised others, dispensed moral teachings to a broader audience, and preserved the best parts of their own heritage for future generations. And in the process, women who probably never would have been published or remembered beyond their family ties have produced artifacts worthy of continued inquiry.

Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories.

The community cookbook is a familiar item in many kitchens. Usually compiled by women and sold to raise funds for a charitable cause, these collections of recipes may seem to be utilitarian objects that exhibit little if any narrative interest. But this is hardly the case. In Recipes for Reading, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine community cookbooks as complex texts deserving serious study. The contributors contend that such cookbooks have stories to tell about the lives and values of the women who wrote them, stories that are autobiographical in most cases, historical in some, and fictive in others.

Our Sisters' Recipes: Exploring “Community” in a Community Cookbook

Depuis la Guerre de secession, il est courant que des organisations communautaires benevoles americaines, generalement feminines, recueillent des fonds a travers la publication et la vente d'ouvrages de cuisine. Ces ouvrages nous renseignent sur la communaute elle-meme, mais aussi sur la participation des femmes a la societe. Il en va ainsi du recueil Les recettes de nos soeurs edite en 1909 par une communaute juive de Pittsburg