COOKING UP COMMUNITY
AN ISSUE ON COMMUNITY COOKBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
By Kelli Kimura with Amanda Herbert
Community cookbooks occupy a special place in studies of food and culture. Broadly, cookbooks are useful material objects which summarize the influence of culture on food, reflect shifts in culinary popularity, track changes in culinary techniques, follow advancements in technology, and underscore domestic ideologies. While recipes can be made in unique ways in different kitchens, cookbooks also standardize what is produced in kitchens and how. And as community cookbooks specifically seem to offer a unique, coveted glimpse into the food worlds and habits of one specific culture, community, or family, they are more than just manuals: they serve as important storytellers and memory-keepers. They are also gaining increasing attention, with the Library of Congress digitizing a special online collection of Community Cookbooks from across its holdings; and recent radio programs and museum exhibitions highlighting the contributions of community cookbook writers and readers.
Community cookbooks foster senses of togetherness and belonging, but they can also be exclusionary and limiting. Building on the literature of scholars like Carolyn Morris and Arjun Appadurai, the Summer 2024 issue of the Recipes Project encourages all of us to think about community cookbooks’ ability to both reflect and influence, help and harm.
The posts in this issue push the boundaries of what a community cookbook both was and can be, from hand-bound, spiral-ring Parent Teacher Association (PTA) fundraisers, to newer, digital manifestations on social media; and from exercises in map-making, to tools for grappling with legacies of colonialism. Our authors explore community and recipes from the nineteenth century through to the modern day, and in places like Kolkata, Los Angeles, and Atlanta; Garhwal in Uttarakhand, Emscote in Warwickshire, and Pasadena in Texas. Perhaps not surprisingly, the modern Midwestern United States is a particular focus, but even as they delve deeply into the cultures and cookbooks of Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Lexington, and Milwaukee, our contributors show us how community cookbooks can offer avenues for people to write, think about, and share information on topics like immigration, the ethics of the meat industry, abortion rights, and the politics of hunger. Join us as we think deeply about community, and how we build ties — and maybe break them — when we eat together.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Community Cookbooks as Mapping Resources
By Suzanne Zoe Joskow
When I began building The Community Cookbook Archive — made up of over four hundred Los Angeles-based collective recipe books, spanning three centuries — I was struck by the books’ role in Southern California place-making. The majority of community cookbooks are self-published, which means the included recipes are not from professional chefs. Instead, the entries reflect how contributors, usually women, cooked and ate at home. Indeed, notions of “home” are foundational to these books – from recipes evoking the flavors of a childhood far away to those anchored in native ingredients. Community cookbooks are absolutely records of place.
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‘An Extravagant Touch’: Emscote Primary School’s Charity Cookbook
By Bethan Davies
Rootling through my mother’s files in the midst of moving house last year, I came across ‘The Emscote Cookery Book’, a recipe collection created by a group of teachers in the late 1970s as a community fundraiser for their Warwickshire primary school. My maternal grandmother Betty Richards was headmistress at Emscote Primary School and contributed multiple recipes to the collection.
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“It Tastes/Smells like Home!”: Memory, Food Nostalgia & the Immigrant Experience
By Annima Bahukhandi
British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls, to the deep red color that stains hands, tongue, fingers, and even clothes. For her, pomegranates transport her back to the warmth of Iranian culture and cooking, a stark contrast to the negative portrayal of Iran in the British culture she grew up in.
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A Connecticut Yankee in Texas
By Meli Alexander
Growing up in a small state like Connecticut in the 1970s was a great time to be an aspiring chef. Sandwiched between bigger states and bigger cities shaped Hartford Connecticut’s cuisine: NYC-style Chinese takeout, with its ubiquitous packets of duck sauce and hot mustard; Italian-American delights such as baked ziti or sausage and peppers; and Boston deep-fried cod and clams. These foods woke up my taste buds and my curiosity about the world.
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In Search of Meat Substitute Recipes in Historical U.S. Community Cookbooks
By Jennifer “JJ” Harbster
The Library of Congress has been collecting U.S. community cookbooks since the copyright deposit of one of the country’s first community cookbooks, Maria Moss’s 1864 “Poetical Cook Book” which raised funds for wounded Civil War soldiers. What has amassed since are thousands of titles that represent more than a century of U.S. food trends, eating habits, food systems, and responses to historical events.
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Stovetop Solidarity: “Recipes for Semi-Starvation” and Antipoverty Organizing in American Cities
By Kimba Stahler
Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals.
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“Pain au Levain”: Reproductive Rights, Recipes, and Community Cookbooks
By KC Hysmith, PhD
Packaged in a brown paper and cellophane fold-over bag, not unlike those you’d find at your corner bakery or at the farmers’ market, the Beaux “Bread Bag” contains a hefty stack of paper printed with information about reproductive rights and health care access. Activists gather in-person around a table to share this knowledge, much of it word-of-mouth, and then work together to print, cut, fold, and assemble each bread bag specific to the needs of individual states–including Wisconsin, Kentucky, Georgia, Illinois, and North Carolina–whose governments have severely restricted or completely banned numerous essential reproductive health care procedures.
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The Imagined, Implied, and Authentic Audiences of an American Settlement House Cookbook
By Kimberly S. Baker, PhD
In early 20th-century Milwaukee, a Midwestern American industrial city, social reformer Lizzie Kander and her fellow aid workers published a community cookbook (of sorts). Kander and colleagues ran “The Settlement,” a settlement house that supported and acclimated immigrant Jewish families to urban American living, offering social services, arts and culture opportunities, and classes including English and civics.
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Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach
By Agnibha Maity
In Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth century made way for women writers to archive and standardise recipes.
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Teaching with Community Cookbooks
By Jolie Braun
Increasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language, women’s lives, and African American history. In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks.
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Iconic Japanese-American Dishes in Community Cookbooks
By Ayumi Takenaka
Coming Soon…
TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES
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In Search of Meat Substitute Recipes in Historical U.S. Community Cookbooks
By Jennifer “JJ” HarbsterThe Library of Congress has been collecting U.S. community cookbooks since the copyright deposit of one of the country’s first community cookbooks, Maria Moss’s 1864 “Poetical Cook Book” which raised funds for wounded Civil War soldiers. What has amassed since are thousands of titles that represent more than a century of U.S.…
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Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach
By Agnibha MaityIn Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth…
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“It Tastes/Smells like Home!”: Memory, Food Nostalgia & the Immigrant Experience
By Annima Bahukhandi British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls,…
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A Roti by Any Other Name Would Taste Like Home: Food Culture in the Punjabi-Mexican Communities of the Early 20th Century United States
By Haritha Govind The South Asian diaspora has made its way throughout many parts of the world –bringing along cuisines, opening restaurants, and familiarizing the world with dishes like naan and lassi. These are immigrant stories that have a strong continuity even today. But what about Indian immigrant stories that were a snapshot in time,…
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Orality and Multi-Sensoriality: the Secret Ingredients of Food’s Longevity and the Power of Memory
By Elisa Pastorelli The uninterrupted transmission of knowledge of oral traditions, of gestures, of words, of the practices that characterize and give significance to food and eating culture has enabled its deepest tangible and intangible foundations. By taking part in practices and knowledges related to food, people recover from the complexity of contemporary times, reconnecting…
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Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey
By Su Hyeon Cho Mid-August is the grape harvest season in Vakfılı, an Armenian village perched on the mountainous region of the southernmost Turkish province of Hatay. Tasting grapes takes the form of ritual in the patient waiting until Surp Asdvadzadzin, the holiday that celebrates the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary by blessing the grapes…
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Featured image: this issue features a photograph from 1942. In the image, members of the National Youth Administration prepare food in the hospital kitchen of the farm workers’ community in Eleven Mile Corner, AZ. The hospital, Cairns General, was part of the Farm Security Administration.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Eleven Mile Corner, Arizona. Cairns General Hospital, FSA (Farm Security Administration) farm workers’ community. National Youth Administration girls helping in the hospital kitchen” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed August 15, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/50feecd0-ad60-0137-d0b8-0fd8a29669aa