But just as quilts become more and more legible the more we know about quilting techniques, so do community cookbooks (CCBs) become more communicative as we study how they are put together. With quilts some of the elements we need to understand are things like the national or regional origins of patterns, symbols of organizations or religions that may show up on quilts, why certain fabrics appear in quilts at particular moments in history, which dyes fade and which are more constant, when commerical patterns were first published in periodicals. With CCBs, as my title predicts, I believe there are many factors that help reveal the embedded history and values that these recipe collections include. That "and more" in my title gives me the room to speculate ....
Luckily for me, when I first began to investigate community cookbooks back in 1992, there was a bit of scholarship to help me. Lynne Ireland's article on "The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways Autobiography" (published in Western Folklore in 1981), Laura Shapiro's 1986 book Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century -- which mentions community cookbooks but doesn't focus on them, and Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett's "Recipes for Creating Community: The Jewish Charity Cookbook in America" (Jewish Folklore and Ethnology, 1987) gave me important guidelines. So, you could say those three pieces were my primers. In addition, work I'd done on quilts helped give me a mindset that would look at both text and nontext communication. But it took a wide variety of articles, books, and people before I felt I was a good reader of CCBs. One needs a lot of history background, for instance -- including information in patterns of immigration, the changing roles of women, and the invention of various technologies. One requires a good deal of culinary history, scholarship in women's studies, African American Studies, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and nutrition, too. Of course, I'm still learning, but here are some of the things I'd have you consider in order to really read a CCB.
One note of caution: I want to point out that reading CCBs involves a combination of objective and subjective approaches. It's definitely interpretive work, and different people can have different interpretations, as with poems, memoirs, fiction, and other literary works. I've referred to CCBs as collective, partial autobiographies. They are stacked with bits and pieces of information, some consciously installed by the books' compilers, some that slides in unconsciously, as with any created artifact. We each read these components somewhat differently, depending on our own interests, prior knowledge, experience.
My title indicates there will be four divisions to this talk, so let me take up these subtopics in order.
Recipes
The obvious place to start. In reading a CCB you have to look at which
recipes are included and which are excluded, and sometimes the recipe
categories, their language, and their order can be important factors as
well.
The first CCB I analyzed in depth -- Our Sisters' Recipes, 1909, Pittsburgh. Jewish, but what about the recipes you see on your handout? Here are recipes that include "forbidden" foods, treyf items, shellfish and bacon. Elsewhere in the book, meat and milk are combined. In the soup section there is no soup using barley, in the bread section there's no rye bread. There's no holiday section with special dishes for Passover of Chanukah. So one notices the recipes that are in and that aren't there and one begins to wonder about definitions of Jewishness.
The 1886 Presbyterian Cook Book (excerpt on home remedies included in handout), like may other 19th-century CCBs, indicates through inclusion of such recipes that women were cooking up much more than food in their kitchens. Their responsibilities are thus defined and "homemaker" takes on a new definition.
In example 3 of the handout, from an 1896 Delaware, Ohio, church-supporting CCB, we see the fun language of a recipe indicating the settled and comfortable nature of women from a German background who can satirize themselves with a "Kaughie Keighk" recipe. In contrast, check out the recipes from Mariechen's Saxon Cook Book (Cleveland, Ohio, 1955), where language is used to authenticate and strengthen ethnic affiliation.
With African American cookbooks, it's interesting to see what range of recipes is included and think about why this might be true. Are the recipes exclusively for what are called heritage or soul food recipes? Are the ingredients "healthy" or do they contain the high cholesterol items so many doctors have warned African Americans against? Are distinctly African recipes included or excluded? Are recipes from other parts of the African diaspora included?
Example 5 in the handout concerns the order in which recipes occur. A couple of years ago I got interested in Texas CCBs and how they communicated the relationship between Anglos and Mexicans in various regions of that large state. It's immensely complicated and I don't pretend to have a real handle on the topic, but I did see that many of the CCBs from the earlier part of the 20th century isolated Mexican recipes into their own "ghettos" -- usually towards the end of the book. These books have sections for what are variously called "Mexican," "Spanish," or "Foreign" recipes. So the example, from a 1938 Houston Women's Club cookbook, puts the Mexican recipes towards the back of the book.
These examples, hopefully, give you a sense of the complexities within just the recipe selection, language, and order. Next, let's consider how history is embedded in the cookbooks. Is the history told directly, as history (of a place, an institution, a family)? Or is it told in fragments? What of the history is told and what isn't? Who is in charge of the telling (and who has been in charge of it in the years before this cookbook came out)? What counts as history in this cookbook? If there are ads, do these contribute to the history being told, and how?
History
My favorite examples of history in CCBs, because they are so much about
history, are The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro,
published by the National Council of Negro Women in 1958, and one that
isn't even between regular covers, Canyon Cookery, on 8 1/2 x 11
paper, spiral-bound between paper covers, produced by the Bridger
Canyon (Montana) Women's Club in 1978.
The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, which I helped see back into print (via Beacon Press), positions the women compilers as historians; they arrange the book by the months of the calendar, selecting recipes to celebrate special events and people within each month. Anecdotes, short histories, photos, and historical documents surround the selected recipes. The original edition had no index and the table of contents did not list all recipes. Thus the reader was forced to read through the history in order to find recipes -- a technique that the book's editor, a journalist/historian named Sue Bailey Thurman, seems to have insisted upon. Thurman took what she called a "culinary approach to Negro history," and when you look through the book, you find as much history as food. Some of the history retold in this book would have been common knowledge for blacks and some whites in 1950s America, but other items -- many of them about black women, not just men, the usual subjects of history at that thime -- could easily have been revelations for many readers. The positioning of black women as history tellers was pretty radical at this time, too, and the use of a cookbook to tell that history -- a book that goes into the intimate region of the home and is shared by women with their families -- is an interesting creation, an interesting educational move! The book includes details about well-known historical figures such as Nat Turner ( memorialized with a crackling corn bread recipe in the August section since he led his insurrection in August, 1831) and Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute and well-known leader in the period 1890 to the early 20th century (celebrated by an anniversary wedding cake recipe because the book's authors honor him with his wife, Margaret Murray Washington who was such a powerful assistant to his work). But lesser known figures show up in the pages of this book and enlarge what counts as history. How many people reading this book already knew of Prudence Crandall for example, the first to open a school for young black girls in the USA?
Canyon Cookery also puts women in charge of history, for a women's club put together this most fascinating combination of geology, pioneer and Native American history, photographs, sketches, anecdotes, and recipes. The editorial staff list gives credit to about 20 women who worked on the historical narrative, the recipes, section editing, photography, illustrations, copy editing and data entry. The only male listed is the data processing consultant (an early computer system was used to produce the camera ready copy). The two hundred-plus pages of this book take us from teepees to blenders, and include an index, maps, and an extensive bibliography. The book is divided into sections based on history (Indian and Prehistoric Phase; Explorer and Military Years, Early Homesteader Period; Community Days, and The Canyon Today). The handout included a "taste" of its way of combining historical photographs, a recipe from a living resident, and a recipe from an historical document. Food here is seen as an integral part of history.
I can't help but think back to my early analogy to quilts when I look at this book and at the Historical Cookbook. Both show us a discursive, patched or pieced format. A major feminist literary critic, Elaine Showalter, has discussed the "invented" forms of women's culture in America (19), and sees "piecing and patchwork" as "metaphors for a Female Aesthetic, for sisterhood, and for a politics of feminist survival" (146, Sisters Choice, 1991); in relations to CCBs, we see that same aesthetic playing out in unusual ways to tell history (and as I'll show in my next section, other values as well).
Values
The next word in my subtitle is "values," although clearly we cannot
completely separate "values" from "history." What values especially
about the "community" of the cookbook creators and the organization
they're supporting do we see stated explicitly or implied? The values
might have to do with education, art, religion, ethnicity, gender, or
other factors. What communicates the values -- the recipes, anecdotes,
other prefatory material, ads, the way the book is organized, indexed,
illustrated?
Let's think about a cookbook I've already mentioned and see what kinds of values are communicated by the elements in it. Going back to Our Sisters' Recipes, why those treyf recipes, and why no recipes for matzoh ball soup or blintzes, for example? This is where the interdisciplinary fun begins. When I first read that family cookbook, I didn't know much about "Jewish" food, even though I'm Jewish. I didn't understand what I had to learn by reading about patterns of immigration and culinary histories; that German Jews -- the people who were my ancestors, arriving on these shores in the middle of the 19th century and working hard to assimilate themselves into middle-class life north and south of the Mason-Dixon line -- took their culinary standards from Germany, not from Eastern Europe. Foods like blintzes and pickled herring, for example, come from Polish and Russian food traditions, not German ones. So that explains part of the recipe section. Our Sisters' Recipes was published at the height of Eastern European Jewish immigration and, in fact, that influx of observant (often orthodox) Jews threatened the assimilated Reform Jews of my grandmother's clan. So it may be no mere ethnic affiliation that made these women eliminate most signs of Jewishness from their text. They may have been protecting their American-ness! As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, it was "characteristic of Reform Judaism of the period to define itself through a rejection of Jewish ceremonialism coupled with a commitment to philanthropy, a combination that reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the treyf charity cookbook," and I think that combination helps us understand the values being expressed in books like Our Sisters' Recipes.
Again, looking at a cookbook discussed earlier, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, we see that the compilers of the book don't just tell history, they value it, and in particular they value the history of blacks in America and take an integrationist, world peace through understanding position, with a section of recipes celebrating the United Nations, for example, and by the inclusion of information and recipes related to some whites they honor, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Jefferson (oddly enough). Given the date of this book, I see it as part of the civil rights movement -- asserting the power and important of black culture of all kinds -- southern and northern, working class and upper crust, past and present. In addition, one can see that the African-ness of certain foods included in the book is not stressed. Whether this is a conscious move (we are Americans, not Africans) or an unconscious one (since little culinary history had been done that traced many common foods to Africa), I can't say for sure, but it does seem to increase the idea that the community being stressed here is one of Americans with ties and interests in the whole world, not Americans with exclusive ties to an African homeland.
But let's look at a very different cookbook to continue this exploration of incorporated or implied values. The title page of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, put forth by the women of the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, contains a little epigraph on its title page: "Bad dinners go hand in hand with total depravity, while a properly fed man is already half saved." This popular saying of the time reinforces the idea that women's domestic work, properly executed, guarantees moral strength. Scholars of women's history have helped us understand the way that economic and social forces colluded to position 18th- and 19th-century women as "angels" in the house, relegated to the domestic sphere while men were seen as managers of public life. Some women, as we know, broke those social roles and worked outside the home but most didn't, some stretched the boundaries by becoming active in reform movements (abolition, temperance, and suffrage being the best known). But within a book like the Buckeye Cook Book, we see women valuing themselves as not only fund-raisers, for after all, they like other cookbook compilers, were publishing, were going out into the public world and soliciting ads to support the book, were selling the book, too. But, in addition, this book shows them valuing themselves as what we could call "domestic managers" -- elevating the role of homemaker to that of business women! On the page following the title page, we find this dedication: "To the plucky housewives of 1876, who master their work instead of allowing it to master themselves." The book's preface stresses its interest in practicality and this is further reinforced by a very detailed table of contents (not common in books of this era).
When we look at the actual recipes, we see that Marysville women of 1876 were not only responsible for cooking foods but also for preparing special items for "the sick room," sometimes for butchering and curing meats, concocting cleaning potions, participating in farm activities, and preparing cures for sick animals, making glue, stain removers, and other household aids, and more The book, in a sense, defines a woman's role and, through its assortment of contents, honors all the talents and knowledge of "plucky housewives." The book actually had a hand in elevating the role of these women, for as I learned from the church's historian, Charlie Thompson (back in about 1996), before the success of Buckeye Cook Book, the women's auxiliary of the church had no control of their own money but after its very successful publication (it went through many editions), they were allowed to manage the money themselves and to make many decisions about the church's development.
For a very different example of how values are included in CCBs, look at the excerpt from Out of Our Kitchen Closets. Here you see the language within a recipe asking readers to understand that whether they are gay or straight, they are linked by their Jewishness and by a common heritage of food and culture.
I'd also like to point out that the ads and illustrations included in many CCBs often tell us about the values of a "community" -- so I've reproduced a few of these visuals in the handout. The wonderful Geo. B. Alexander ad in the Delaware Cook Book of 1896 shows you the desire to be up on the latest in household decor. The cookbook compilers from Delaware don't see themselves living in a backwater, but very "with it." From the 19th century on, ads for foodstuffs, stove suppliers, and restaurants/hotels are prevalent. But when we see business schools, garages, insurance companies, and travel agencies enter the picture, we know that women's roles are changing. They have more control of money, make more decisions about how its gets spent, are more comfortable working with people in such companies to solicit their advertisements.
With illustrations (drawings) we often find pictures that give a flavor of a location, adding to the valuing of that region. Example 12 gives us a sense of old New Orleans, sets a mood, you could say. Sometimes drawings stereotype people (as with a picture of a sleeping Mexican in sombrero and serape, beneath a palm tree, attached to a section of Mexican recipes in a 20th-century Texas cookbook) and thereby express an attitude, too. The drawing on the cover of The Greek Palatte: A Cookbook shows the way that an illustration, aligned with the choice of a book's name, reinforces the idea that cooking is a genuine art, just like painting.
And More
At the end of my title are the words "and more" -- and here I'd like
to take us into genre-bending community cookbooks, books that are very
hard to classify, books that ask us to think about the function of
writing, of remembering and producing recipes, and of creating stories
about and through food.
In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin was put together by starving Jewish women in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, compiled by Mina Pachter and passed from hand to hand until it reached Mina's daughter, Anny, a quarter of a century after her mother's death. Most of the recipes are memories of better times, when meat and rich desserts were part of the writers' middle-class Jewish life, although some are recipes of wartime life before the concentration camps, incorporating ersatz coffee or honey, or indicating use of optional ingredients when the preferred item wasn't available. Many recipes are incomplete or confused in language or ingredients or both, most likely because the women who recorded them were suffering malnutrition that affected their intellects. One can only imagine the mixture of pain and pleasure the women compilers of this book had, holding onto their identity by remembering the pre-war past, hoping to live again to cook cakes, meats, and vegetables for their loved ones, imagining the tastes of good food as they faced nothing or some awful gruel provided in the camp. This is not a "cookbook" to cook from.
The Northern Exposure Cookbook imitates a community cookbook but the community is, of course, a fiction. For many of us, the TV show, Northern Exposure, which ran from 1990 to 1992, presented something of an ideal community -- it had blacks, whites, Native Americans; it had romance and family; it had nature; it had conflicts between old and young, rich and poor, yet people lived together, communicated, and supported each other through a variety of often humorous incidents. The 1993 cookbook imitates CCBs quite well, with foreword and introduction by two of the older characters from the series, Maurice Minnifield and Ruth-Anne Miller. The recipes are actually quite good and are accompanied by all kinds of commentary from the personalities of Cicely, Alaska. Very folksy, very cute. At the back of the book is an episode reference guide that links many of the recipes to specific episodes of the show. Isn't this a fascinating genre-bender?
The last book I want to included in this "and more" category is Spoonbread & Strawberry Wine. The Northern Exposure book was "fiction" via a cookbook, and this is a "memoir" through a cookbook. Subtitling their book "Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family," sisters Norma Jean and Carole Darden explain their work, originally published in 1978, as part of oral history, and urge others to collect the stories, artifacts, and memories that have been lost to so many, particularly those of black ancestry, like themselves. Recalling Alex Haley's 1976 book Roots, which became so famous via the television series shortly after its publication, we can see that the Darden sisters were inspired by Haley's work to recover African American family history. But they did their work around and through food memories. This book contains family trees, photographs, little biographies of family members of Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Ohio, and other locations, with family members' recipes for everything from wine to ice cream, from fricasseed rabbit or squirrel to "violet vanishing cream." The book is an homage to a family, with all its variety, a celebration of survival and success, told with humor and admiration.
My talk today has touched on just some of the elements of reading
community cookbooks, but I hope it will prove useful as you encounter
such books in the future. There are so many other subtopics to think
about -- the relationship of community cookbook work to the lives of
the women compilers, for example, but that's for another time. Or the
way that this very American form, the community cookbook -- beginning
back in the mid-19th century -- has spread around the world to tell
histories and values of many kinds. But that, too, must be left for
some other day's discussion!