Category Archives: Culinary History

‘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. Gently flipping through the 18 pages which had been modestly stapled together to form a book, I saw a beautiful calligraphic font which detailed over 30 sweet and savoury recipes for food and drink, alongside careful illustrations of kitchen utensils, platters, and foodstuffs. 

Image 1 The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 1: The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2 The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2: The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.

Beginning to read the recipes, I discovered the community collection to be a tantalising glimpse into culinary trends of the 1970s and the gendered expectations around domestic economies at the time. All of the contributors to this collection, bar one (a Miss Gent) were married women, working both as teachers and as homemakers. The style of many of the recipes are curt, providing the reader with detailed yet precise instructions for culinary success. Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for a ‘Quick Dessert’, which involves boiling some apples and mixing with lime jelly, a dish that could be whipped up rapidly, suggests these women straddled professional and domestic life and possessed strategies for fulfilling the demands of teacher, homemaker, and hostess. The relative sparsity of detail of the personal resonances of these recipes aligns with the cookbook’s role within a boundaried school environment, and is a reminder of the often intensely personal nature of recipe knowledge and exchange, repurposed here within a professional community. There are hints of women’s culinary and domestic responsibilities in moments when the professional façade slips, a Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’ amusingly notes in her recipe ‘there will still be a slurp [of Guinness] to put the cook in a good frame of mind to tackle the washing up’, a tongue in cheek moment which gestures towards 20th c. British women’s multifaceted roles within the home. 

Image 3: Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’. Image courtesy of the author.

Most striking were the clues that suggested that this communal cookbook, despite its overt function as a fundraiser, worked as a compact textual marker of social display and a register of class co-ordinates. This evidently gave teachers power to self-fashion and construct their identities as women of economic means, belonging to part of a larger familial structure that could afford to experiment with recent culinary fashions, which include the protean fusion of Anglo culinary traditions with global ingredients and European recipe cultures. A recipe for ‘Biskotta’ (Mrs Charlesworth) is an English take on tiramisu, and the magnificent ‘Spaghetti Platter’ (Mrs Wigmore) specifies the use of ‘long Italian spaghetti’ but also calls for a tablespoon of Branston pickle, a quintessential English relish. A detailed illustration of said platter indicates spaghetti’s relative novelty on the culinary scene. Other recipes are intriguing both for their use of foreign ingredients and for their relative expense, indicating some teachers’ desire to signal their ability to buy such rarefied goods, and perhaps representing a form of exclusion for those who could not afford to buy such ingredients. Mrs Jackson’s recipe for ‘Hummus’ provides the interpretative tag ‘chick peas’, alongside instructions for where to find ‘tahina’, ‘a paste from sesame paste available from delicatessens’, suggesting hummus’ new-fangled nature and its potential expense. 

Image 4: Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for ‘Spaghetti Platter’. Image courtesy of the author.

Mrs Hammond is an individual keen to demonstrate both her expensive household appliances and her rarefied tastes. She supplies a recipe for ‘Microwave meringues’, using the flashy appliance of the microwave which was only just starting to become affordable for domestic use in the late 1970s. Mrs Hammond also has an indulgent recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’, an adaptation of the Black Forest Gateau, which calls for copious amounts of After Eights and whipped cream, and involves an intricate decorating scheme which would rival that of any British Bake-Off contestant today. In a moment of seemingly false modesty, she instructs that one can add crème de menthe into the layers of the cake: ‘an extravagant touch’, a phrase belying the evident richness of her cake even without the addition of liquor; her recipe is rich both in terms of taste and cost. While this is a community and charity cookbook, it is evident that the teachers are creating specific personas through their recipes which are deeply invested in social and class structures.

Image 5: Mrs Hammond’s recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’. Image courtesy of the author.

Moving for a final moment from the communal to the personal, it is the memories of my grandmother, which are held within the cookbook’s pages, which encourage me to revisit the recipes. Her recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’, a kind of coconutty Florentine biscuit, is easy to make and designed to please a crowd, a reminder of her happily hectic life in multiple roles as headteacher, mother of three, and vicar’s wife. The pages sticky from golden syrup and sugar, this cookbook constitutes a living familial heirloom, and an emblem of family community and continuity in the present day.

Image 6: My grandmother Mrs Richard’s recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’. Image courtesy of the author.

Bethan Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Roehampton in the Department of English. Her studies are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and women in English culture at a time when colonial economies were in their nascent stage of development. She has recently worked as a researcher on the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’, and collaborated with The National Archives to produce resources on sugar, tobacco, global trade, and intoxicants for schools and audiences beyond the academy. 

Related Recipes Project blog post: ‘Astonishable Composed Posset’

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.

In the most literal sense, it is not uncommon for community cookbooks to include actual maps. The Westchester Directory and Culinary Art community cookbook, published 1950, opens with a map of the area, followed by hand-written recipes from residents within LA’s Westchester neighborhood. Visible towards the top of the map (image below) one can see the land that was, at that time, Howard Hughes’ personal airfield, now Playa Vista. 

Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.
Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.

Beyond maps, many community cookbooks, especially older ones, contain both the names of the recipe contributors and also their home addresses. In some instances, it may be the only time this directory information ever appeared in print — even in phone books, which often listed only a household’s men, or in census data, due to systemic undercounting of certain demographics.

One example of an early Los Angeles cookbook that features contributor addresses is The Federation Cook Book. The book was compiled and published in 1911 by Bertha L. Turner, on behalf of the California State Federation of Colored Women. Turner was a sought-after Pasadena caterer and philanthropist, who also served as a State Superintendent of Domestic Science. In the 1930s, she ran the Tea Room at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.
Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.

The Federation Cook Book is filled with recipes contributed by and, importantly, for Black women from throughout California. In her book, The Jemima Code, journalist Toni Tipton-Martin writes that the Federation Cookbook was one of the first books “that preserved the culinary values inherited and practiced by the black middle class.”

The cookbook also documents a uniquely Southern California history. While many of the included recipes come from across California, a significant number were contributed by women in Bertha L. Turner’s own Pasadena neighborhood. 

Because contributor addresses are included, I was able to plot many recipes from the book onto a present day map: 

Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.
Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.

Pasadena, especially South Pasadena, was infamous for its racist housing policies and covenants, so it is not surprising to find that the Black, mostly middle-class contributors to this book were clustered in Northwest Pasadena’s thriving Black community — where many early residents had come to LA in the late 1800s from the Jim Crow South. 

But one might immediately notice something else about the map: today the 210 freeway, which began construction in the 1950s, cuts right through these residences. In fact, I had to enlist an early 1900s map of Pasadena to make an address overlay on this present day one, because so many street names were changed, or eliminated. The majority of the Pasadena home addresses in The Federation Cook Book no longer exist. And yet, their kitchens are conjured by cooking from the book Turner compiled. 

As I leafed through other cookbooks in the Archive, I was intrigued to find Turner’s name in two additional books as well. One is an advertisement for Turner’s catering business in The Superior Cookbook (1927), put out by the Lamanda Park Woman’s Club. The other is the 1935 cookbook from the Pasadena Shakespeare Club, where Turner was a caterer. 

Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.
Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.

Seeing Ms. Turner’s name appear in books from both her primarily-Black neighborhood and her, often white, professional context, adds additional insight into the multitude of food worlds she moved between. In the 1927 Superior Cookbook, Turner’s advertisement included a new address, different from where the Federation Cookbook listed her in 1911. The Turners’ new purchase, at 725 Winona Avenue, was significant enough to gain coverage in the California Eagle, which described it as a “palatial residence”. 

I’ve added an approximation of this new address to the previous neighborhood map:

725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.
725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.

Unfortunately, Ms. Turner’s grand residence appears to have been demolished for freeway construction as well, and the address no longer exists. But it is remembered in the cookbooks she contributed to and supported.

Community cookbooks can be a meaningful mapping resource for scholars. However, they have rarely been treated as such and several books in the Community Cookbook Archive do not exist in library or institutional holdings. As with any primary source document, they are flawed and complex reflections of those who made them. But beyond recipes, the books capture granular, neighborhood histories, amidst ever changing city maps. As someone who studies place through the lens of food, I find these books to be an incredible gift. 

Suzanne Zoe Joskow has a BA in American Studies from Yale University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. In her artwork and curatorial practice, Joskow focuses on the connection between physical material and social history — often in the form of maps or archives. Most recently, she is immersed in Los Angeles food history, exploring the ways Angelinos, particularly women, cooked at home. She has spoken about her work with a wide array of public audiences and media, including with The Los Angeles Times, NPR, KCRW’s Good Food, USC’s Archives Bazaar, and The Getty Museum’s ReCurrent Podcast. Joskow created and runs The Community Cookbook Archive, a growing, physical and digital collection of over 400 Los Angeles-based community cookbooks.

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 (Fritz). The Settlement Cookbook began as the instructional text for its cooking class for young women and girls. The settlement house movement generally held that adopting American ways of living included adopting American culinary habits (Ziegelman, 160); thus, settlement-style cooking classes introduced immigrants to mainstream American food.

The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This cookbook and its historical and cultural context, audiences, and communicative goals introduce a “community” where imagined, implied, and authentic audiences converge. 

Settlement house initiatives can be understood as contact zones, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” (Pratt, 1991). In these contact zones, people with social power and economic means strive to influence the lives of less-privileged people, and lower-status settlement house patrons receive services provided by higher-status workers, who themselves benefit, emotionally, culturally, and socially, from giving aid.

The uneven relationships present in settlement houses relies on forms of authoritative power which are also fundamental to advice literature, including household manuals, where higher-status authors instruct and make recommendations to their supposedly lower-status readers (Dorfman, 4). If authors write to advise an implied audience of their own peers, intending that authentic (lower-status) readers were “listening in” for guidance necessary to rise socially, group boundaries become more visible. Such advice is believed to be valuable because “correct” behavior indicates who belongs.

These were dynamics which Kander herself understood very well. Settlement “stood for domestic science;” she argued in The Settlement’s 1899 president’s report, and cooking class trained girls to “do battle with the industrialized world,” and, “equip [them] to become economical and efficient homemakers and intelligent Mothers.”(Annual Report, 1899). Precision and formality reflect the institutional authority of classroom texts and the then-emerging home-economics discipline with its scientific jargon. Cookbook instructions outline techniques, as well as specify cooking tools, brand-name ingredients, and prepared foods.

Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

However, the Settlement’s authentic students were likely more experienced cooks than the start-with-the-basics instructions suggest. While Kander and her circle belonged to Reformed Jewish synagogues, the Settlement’s immigrant patrons followed more conservative religious practice, and kept Kosher (Fritz). The students’ kitchen skills were homegrown, as young Jewish girls learned religious food guidelines and traditional food preparation through helping their mothers (Ziegelman, 95-7). This oral tradition familiar to the immigrant students contrasts with the settlement house’s formal, institutional approach. Kander’s president’s report acknowledges these divergent norms, explaining that the cooking class was “obliged to conduct the lessons on the ‘Kosher’ plan—as the children adhered strictly to the orthodox rules of cooking,” (1899).

Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

That cultural accommodation soon faded; Kander’s notes (1898) for the initial classroom cookbook address Kosher practices, including defining Kosher cooking, dishes for milk and meat meals, meat preparation, and washing (with soda, not soap, which contained “mixed materials”). In the 1903 printed edition, nods to Kosher practices are minimal; non-compliant recipes such as for shellfish, and meat with dairy, feature among its pages. This cookbook content aligned with the non-Kosher eating habits of the local, middle-class, German, Reformed-Jewish community, rather than the settlement house students.

Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

In reflecting the broader local community, the cookbook not only gains potential readers, but also legitimacy by association with them. Community authority (and approval) offers students a permission structure to discard strict, traditional norms and adopt American cuisine.

That affluent, German-Jewish community was also a key cookbook audience, supporting The Settlement and funding the cookbook itself: Kander initially sought to publish the recipes for classroom efficiency, so students could spend class time cooking, not copying. The Settlement’s all-male directors denied this funding request as extravagant, so the women and their publisher instead sold advertisements in the cookbook, many to businesses owned by Kander’s social peers. Students bought copies for a reduced fee; a local department store sold surplus cookbooks to the public. The initial 1901 print run sold out within the year, and proceeds from subsequent editions, edited by Kander herself, funded The Settlement through its first nine years (Fritz). 

The cookbook’s advertising sections showcased luxury goods and services that reinforced the sophisticated, middle-class living invoked by the recipes. While the lifestyle advertised was likely unattainable for the immigrant student audience, the women whose families owned the businesses that purchased ads were more realistic customers. The ads may also have reinforced the ad buyers’ altruism by publicizing who else bought ads and supported the cause.

The cookbook may appear a rhetorical flop, delivering strict, novice-level instruction to knowledgeable students, proscribing a cuisine that challenges students’ religious norms, and advertising an unattainable lifestyle. Instructors with social status and wealth advised newcomers that being American meant following these guidelines. Yet, despite apparent shortcomings of audience analysis, the cookbook remained popular, locally, and nationally, for decades, blending tradition with American tastes and the changing times.

REFERENCES:

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues 12.1 (1992): 21-38.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (2004): 36-49. 

Kander, Mrs. Simon. and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook.  Milwaukee: The Settlement. 1903. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. 2010.

— Annual Report: Milwaukee Jewish Mission. June 6, 1899. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 2 Folder 11) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

—-Notebook. “Cooking Lesson Book.” 1898. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 1 Folder 10) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Ziegelman, J. 97 Orchard: An edible history of five immigrant families in one New York tenement. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. 2010.


Dr. Kimberly Baker is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, in Milwaukee, WI, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication. Her research interests include The Settlement Cookbook, and its author, social reformer Lizzie Black Kander, as well as workplace communication and the experience of user-experience (UX) professionals in organizations. She is at work on a co-authored book about everyday rhetoric for undergraduate STEM students.

Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach

We prepared this traditional lunch when my cousin visited our place as a part of her wedding rituals. This meal includes rice, shukto (mixed vegetables), dal, prawn malai curry, fried potato and nuts, begun bahar (masala eggplant), mutton curry, pomfret with poppy seeds, and shorshe ilish (hilsa mustard gravy). It took more than sixteen hours to cook all of the dishes mentioned here. Photo courtesy of the author.

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. It was at this time when Calcutta, now Kolkata, became the epicentre of food experiments and restaurant culture in India. Restaurants and taverns were run mainly by chefs trained to satisfy European taste buds. They revolutionised the traditional methods and changed the character of dishes with the ingredients borrowed from the West. For example, potatoes – found in every other Bengali dish, even in the famous Calcutta-style Biriyani – appeared on the Bengali platter only by the nineteenth century. The story for cauliflower – many winter cuisines are incomplete without it – is almost similar; colonisers introduced the cultivation of many such vegetables in Bengal. Before the advent of the Britishers, Medieval Bengal depended on rice, curd, fish, local leafy greens, preparations of pulses, and a handful of vegetables such as banana flowers and eggplants. Although Bengalis did not let go of any of the medieval dishes, a lunch or dinner menu from a contemporary household will show more familiarity with the preparation styles invented or modified in colonial times. It was Bengali middle-class women who were responsible for the standardisation of modern cooking practices with their meticulous everyday experimentations, and this evolution of recipes can be traced in many cookbooks written by women authors since the publication of Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish O Niramish Ahar in 1902.

Leela Majumdar’s cookbook, Rannar Boi (1979), co-authored by her daughter Kamala Chattopadhyay, follows the long tradition of archiving recipes but with exceptional care for women’s labour and nutrition in general. She was a gifted author of her time and belonged to one of the most renowned families of Kolkata. However, this cookbook does not belong to her oeuvre as a literary figure in Bengal but serves as a practical handbook for homemakers. She intended this to be a handy companion for everyday cooking. Traditional cooking methods used to be laborious because most of the dishes needed manual grinding of masalas and multi-step heating, and the hot climate forced women to prepare meals twice a day. A typical dish, such as kochu shaker ghonto (taro leaf mishmash), as found in Amish O Niramish Ahar and even in the recent The Calcutta Cookbook, requires the mixing of various spices, grating coconuts, adding pastes of cumin, chilli, and ginger. Cutting the stalks is also a professional task – the outer layer must be removed and washed with salt, or else calcium oxalate crystals might irritate throats. What is interesting about Leela Majumdar’s cookbook is that she avoids any nostalgic remembrance of tedious cooking rituals which exploited women’s labour. In the preface, she declares, “Don’t forget the dishes, but the recipes must be slightly altered… We intend that cooking no meal should take more than two hours.” She focuses on cleanliness, adopting modern kitchenware, and improving hygiene. She contrasts starkly with Europeans or Americans who prefer preparing one main dish per meal to save time for other work, such as a chicken roast accompanied by baked potato or salads. Her recipe notebook is plain and straightforward; there are no East-West divisions. It begins with varieties of soups, which Bengali elite society first tasted during the bloom of restaurant culture in the mid-nineteenth century.  From Scotch broth, tomato soup, and minestrone, she jumps to Bengali Khichdi, sour and bitter lentils, with ease. Her cookbook blurs the distinction other contemporary books celebrate, and her addition of practical notes entitled “The intricacies of homemaking,” along with simplified recipes in lucid Bengali, make the book friendly for readers of all backgrounds and education levels. 

Agnibha Maity is a PhD candidate and a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. He obtained his M.A. and B.A. from the University of Calcutta. His PhD topic focuses on gendered identity in archival discourses. His research interests include subaltern studies, archival studies, and South Asian gender history. He loves discovering lost recipes from rural Bengal and archiving them when possible.