MODERN PERSONAL RECIPE COLLECTIONS
INTRODUCTION
Edited by Jolie Braun, with Jessica P. Clark
Modern recipe collections are typically assemblages accumulated from a variety of sources over many years by an individual for personal use. While scholars have devoted considerable thought to early modern examples, it is perhaps because of their ordinariness and unassuming nature that modern instances have garnered less scholarly attention than published cookbooks. Yet, as the posts in this Spring 2026 issue of The Recipes Project reveal, they are fascinating historical artifacts worthy of our consideration.
Collecting recipes is both a utilitarian and a creative endeavor. The activity is chiefly to address the practical need of having dishes to cook; but it is also the culmination of numerous choices about selecting, documenting, organizing, and preserving recipes and other culinary and domestic information. As primary sources, these collections tell us not only about their creators and the time and place in which the collection was developed, but also about the available ingredients, food trends, cooking methods, and even media and technology of the period.
The posts in this issue underscore the breadth and diversity of modern recipe collections. Case studies include an eighteenth-century Japanese chef’s manuscript book, paper scraps that eighteenth-century Swedish countesses used to record and organize their recipes, the wartime scrapbook of a Danish homemaker, mid-twentieth-century recipe binders that were part of a West German magazine’s marketing strategy, the research notes of a twentieth-century American cookbook author, recipe cards passed down to loved ones in twenty-first century North America, and contemporary recipes shared online. As this summary suggests, the posts also emphasize the various formats that have been used for collecting: bound volumes, loose leaf paper, scrapbooks, binders, recipe cards, and social media. The materiality of these collections is part of their meaning and the information they relay through handwriting, notes, wear, and stains.
While the collections are personal, they may not necessarily be entirely private, as several of these posts show. Recipes circulate; they are given to friends and neighbors, inherited by family members, and posted online. The act of sharing a recipe from one’s collection may be a way to demonstrate expertise, impart knowledge, strengthen bonds, or express love and care. Recipes sometimes credit their original source, an act of acknowledgement that reveals the creator’s personal network.
These posts also highlight that modern personal recipe collections do things that published cookbooks won’t or can’t. For example, they have greater flexibility, and can be edited, reorganized, and updated as needed. Additionally, they may include multiple different recipes for a single food or dish (reflecting the creator’s tastes and preferences). Some recipes are written as more of a memory aid than a set of instructions, eschewing standardization or omitting details the creator already knew (and because of this may even resist being used as a recipe by another individual).
And perhaps this is another reason modern recipe collections have been studied less than cookbooks: they can be messy, idiosyncratic, and intensely personal. But as these posts highlight, this is part of what makes them so compelling. They are intimate records that invite us into the creators’ lives and kitchens, showing us what real people cooked and ate, and how they documented, preserved, and shared their recipes.
Please note: When citing the articles in this issue, follow the OpenEdition guidelines, but use the author’s name provided below the title for attribution.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On Being Influenced: Consuming, Producing, and Performing Recipes on Social Media
By Mark Anthony Arceño
The rise of the Internet and digital media introduced food blogging as a new way of consuming food culture, with recipes available at the click of a button. At the click of another button, they could be saved or printed and filed away. It became easier and more affordable to compare recipes and engage with recipe creators. Chef reputation, star ratings, and responses in comment sections provided a different kind of authority than the more fleeting form of televised cooking shows or the rigidity of published, physical cookbooks…[read more]
Side Dishes and Supplemented Reading: Sammelrezepte in West German Women’s Magazines
By Ellen Barth
The above poem, loosely translated from the original German, appears in a recipe booklet by the food seasoning company Maggi, published sometime in the 1950s. The poem positions traditional handwritten recipe cards as disorganized, ephemeral, and—at least implicitly—old-fashioned. The booklet, on the other hand, is printed and conveniently punched with holes so that it could be included in a binder, perhaps one full of such branded, promotional recipes…[read more]
“From the Dear-Times”: What a Scrapbook Can Tell Us of Household Management
By Anna Katrine Werge Bønnelycke
Gentofte Municipality Archive in Denmark holds several personal recipe collections. Typically such collections are gathered over many years, sometimes a whole lifetime, and contain recipes written by hand for baked goods, pickling, and popular dishes. Marie Prytz’s collection is different. The cover of the simple notebook proclaims it to be “Fra Dyrtiden” (which translates to “From the dear-times” and refers to a period of rising prices during and after the First World War). The collection contains mainly newspaper and magazine clippings of recipes and advice for economizing cooking, storing, cleaning, and general household management in times of rationing and scarcity… [read more]
Teaching Grandma Peg’s Recipes
By Jennifer Cognard-Black
We begin with recipes. On day one of my “Books that Cook” class—an upper-level seminar on the literatures of food in which we study novels, memoirs, and films with recipes—I pass out pens and index cards and ask my students to jot down a recipe they know by heart. To assure those who don’t identify as cooks, I tell them that if they know how to make, say, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a cheese quesadilla, that counts as a recipe…[read more]
When it comes to the eating habits of poet Carl Sandburg’s family, we know that they generally enjoyed hearty meals made from simple, homegrown ingredients. Fresh baked bread, hearty stews, and plenty of products made from Mrs. Lilian Sandburg’s prized Chikaming Dairy goats’ milk were the norm for the family at Connemara, their home in Flat Rock, North Carolina. We have few recipes written by the family in the collection, with most of our knowledge about their eating habits coming from oral histories with the daughters and grandchildren after Carl Sandburg’s death in 1967…[read more]
Folding and Pinning: Organization in Two Swedish 18th-Century Recipe Collections
By Isabelle Fredborg
What called for 4 egg yolks, 8 centiliters of cream, 80 grams of sugar and butter the size of a hen’s egg? With both the title and method missing, I assumed it to be some type of pastry, based on its surrounding recipes. Even after having studied some forty Swedish recipe collections from the eighteenth century, I was not used to this type of guesswork….[read more]
A Recipe for Beans (Without the Beans)
By Sarah Conrad Gothie
What makes a recipe a recipe? When I taught a first-year writing course on food and identity at the University of Michigan in 2010, I assigned a creative final project: craft a short essay translating a specific place, practice, or life philosophy into the rhetorical format of “a recipe for a life worth living,” taking stylistic cues from the conventions of the recipe genre…[read more]
tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes
By KC Hysmith
Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details…[read more]
Recipe for an Unfinished Book: Helen Witty’s America Preserved
By Melina Moe
Among the working papers of food writer Helen Witty (1921–2023), now held at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, sits a project that never became a book. Witty was a two-time James Beard Award winner, editor at Cuisine and Food & Wine, and author of Better Than Store-Bought (1979) and Fancy Pantry (1986). Her archive documents a career that ranged from editor and recipe developer to authority on American home cooking at a time when the food-writing world was still a small and largely male professional scene. She called one of those unfinished projects America Preserved, and in a 1986 proposal to her publisher described it as “the book on sweet preserving in America”…[read more]
The “Silent Summary of Cooking” in Feudal Japan
By Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto
In eighteenth-century feudal Japan, some of the most impressive culinary work was also the least visible. Court chefs prepared elaborate banquets for lords and shoguns, yet their names appear only in private records. Their expertise lived not in bustling restaurants or published books but in personal notes, oral instruction, and years of accumulated practice. The story of Funaki Den’nai (1685–1759) offers a rare window into that hidden world of personal recipes and the extensive research it entails….[read more]
Culinary Literacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Personal Recipe Collections
By Elizabeth M. Schmidt
When I graduated from college in 2011, my cousin Aurora gave me a cookbook she had compiled. Titled “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” it was a binder filled with her favorite recipes: some she wrote herself and others she collected from friends online. Over the years, I added to the binder, slipping magazine cutouts between the pages and taping in small pieces of note paper on which I had scribbled instructions. The cookbook Aurora gave me is part of a long tradition of personal recipe collections created by, and for, women….[read more]
Giving and Receiving (with) Recipe Cards
By Ozoz Sokoh
What does adopting new-to-you methods of recipe preservation look like, especially when you didn’t grow up with an abundance of recipe cards or cookbooks (beyond culinary textbooks)? How do you package shared recipes and memories for travel? Or as Amanda Elise Herbert and Annette Elise Herbert ask in “Golden State: Recipes and Memory,” “How do recipes make memories?” Recipe cards are one way…[read more]
Image Credit: Recipe Collection Likely Compiled by a Columbus, Ohio Resident (SPEC.RARE.MMS.0379), part of the Ohio State University’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library.
TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES
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‘Crost by mistake’: Scribbling in early modern recipe books
By Elaine Leong As anyone familiar with early modern recipe collections well knows, recipe compilers liked to cross things out. One compiler, Lady Anne Fanshawe, particularly springs to mind. Her notebook is filled with pages of recipes which she has crossed out with a large ‘X’. Take a look at the following page from her…
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‘Eat Wheat for Better Health’: Propaganda Posters and the ‘Modern Woman’
By Lara Wijesuriya If you grow up in certain areas of the world, rice is inescapable. Because it is the staple food in Sri Lanka, rice also plays a major cultural role. Although I have eaten rice every day for my entire life, it’s never been my favourite food— a fact that shocks many people.…
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‘I Have Known’: Copying Personal Accounts in Early Modern Receipt Books
By Margaret Maurer Reading British Library Sloane MS 559, a seventeenth-century receipt book, I came upon a recipe with the following efficacy statement: “I have knowne a woman heale many blind people with this medicine following” (MS 559 6v). The sentence was striking, not only because it places powerful healing with Biblical resonance in the…