Category Archives: Culinary History

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.

Pasta, Pasta, or Maccheroni? Obstacles in the Digital Culinary History Environment (Part 2 – Ontologies and Structured Databases)

By James Edward Malin and Gary Thompson

This two-part post elaborates on three problems inhibiting the building and connecting of culinary research databases: obstacles to combining historical mediums, differences in data entry structures, and challenges of historical culinary ontologies. It could be said that culinary history’s multidisciplinarity nature makes it difficult to marshal a level of cohesion to tackle such problems. Still, food history’s access to so many methodologies should provide or inspire solutions. Hopefully, in elucidating these challenges, we may begin to discuss and develop the best principles and practices for gastro-historical databases in the future. In the first part of this discussion, we outlined the pitfall of not utilizing existing bibliographic metadata standards and the limitations of relying on unstructured digitized content in culinary history environment.  This second part elaborates on the challenges faced by structured food history databases and historical culinary ontologies.


Unlike those unstructured databases discussed in the previous part, there are a smaller number of culinary history databases that are structured. These include resources like The Sifter, CoReMA, and ckbk. Among this small selection most have used unique approaches to structuring data entry and discovery. A common first step among these projects is to define the structure and components of a recipe. But as any recipe historian knows, this is already a challenge as “some [recipes] are very detailed, some are rather vague.”[1] Historical recipes can include much that doesn’t fit a standard structure, such as associations with feast days, a cook’s personal notes, lists of ingredients, and other procedural cooking instructions. These may also be accompanied by engraved carving diagrams, photographs of the finished dish, or, more recently, video demonstrations. Determining what should or should not be included in recipes is not easy.

Just as the purpose for reading a recipe from a cookbook determines which aspects of the text are relevant for the reader (sometimes to cook the dish, but sometimes for some culinary escapism), several needs may determine a database’s recipe structure. For example, commercial internet search engine providers encourage publishers of online, digital-first recipes to use Schema.org’s standard Recipe schema. This schema provides a common structure for recipes’ ‘how-to’ aspects, including ordered instructions, preparation times, ingredients, and nutritional data. This schema invites us to consider recipes as independent creative works separate from, but linked to, a cookbook or manuscript. Unfortunately, this schema also homogenizes recipe formats—historical or modern—to benefit search algorithms. And, of course, this comes at the expense of the sometimes crucial but highly variable culinary information found in and around the edges of historical recipe texts.


Figure 4: Fig in Aspic, Recipe with Annotations, GAMS. 562.10.52on CoReMa.
H.W. Klug and J. Eibinger, “Semantic Annotation of W1 – Wien, Österr. Nationalbibl., Cod. 2897,” CoReMA – Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages. Corpus – Analysis – Visualisation. With the help of A. Böhm, J. Eibinger, and C. Steiner, (2021).http://hdl.handle.net/11471/562.10.52.

The Sifter and CoReMA project share similar recipe metadata structures that include ingredients, equipment, and cookbook concepts while also taking language and historical variation into context. The Sifter is an open, public, and mediated culinary history website that allows users to enter individual recipes as sections within a cookbook or other culinary work. The Sifter’s database does not contain full-text recipes. Instead, a researcher enters each recipe’s name and page number and then indicates which ingredients, tools, or methods are mentioned within the recipe text. CoReMa adopted an alternative approach of annotating digitized recipe text or images with a culinary semantic model comprising classes such as ‘ingredient’ and ‘instruction.’ Each recipe word or sentence from the source text is annotated and linked to a dictionary of ingredients and tools (figure 4). A standard structure for specifying recipe metadata, such as what defines a recipe or an ingredient, would provide a common language to facilitate description, identification, and content interoperability without constraining technical designs.

Even if digital collections choose common structures for recipe data, having a common vocabulary to populate those structures is still challenging. One remedy for this common problem among academic databases is to use standardized vocabularies and ontologies. In standardized ontology, concepts are predefined in a thesaurus that mediates conceptual classification. CoReMa has used the knowledge graph Wikidata’s open, standardized ontology by integrating it as the project’s vocabulary lookup. For example, all historical recipes that include the ingredient ‘saffron’ are, in turn, linked to the WikiData entry saffron (Q25434). This demonstrates that using shared metadata sources as a taxonomy of common culinary or food concepts can improve interoperability and reduce duplication of metadata creation. In theory, The Sifter database could link the entry for ‘saffron’ from its index of ingredients to saffron (Q25434 ), too, thus interlinking the databases together.

The ‘farm to fork’ food ontology, FoodOn, with its focus on food production and agriculture, describes a ‘pasta food product’ (FOODON_00001211) as ‘A food made from an unleavened dough of wheat or buckwheat flour and water, sometimes with other ingredients such as eggs and vegetable extracts.’ It also includes categories for pasta, such as canned, dried, fresh, frozen, or wet-packed cereal grain products, as well as 92 processed pastas, 40 of which are macaroni food products (figure 5). This differs from Wikidata which describes pasta (Q178) as an “Italian food made from flour, eggs, and water and shaped in different forms, usually cooked and served with a sauce” and is simultaneously a type of shelf-stable food, a kind of groat, pasta and legume, and a sort of dish or specific food preparation.

However, even these ontologies may not immediately suit culinary historical purposes. If for no other reason than the determinedly contemporary nature of these ontologies, work would be required to historicize their definitions and classifications. Furthermore, in addition to the same type of crosswalking issues that database structures share, there is also a conceptual problem within many food ontologies—that food concepts can be both different and the same. For example, while “pasta” has a different meaning when it’s an ingredient in a recipe versus when it’s a recipe in itself, at the same time, it also means the same thing…pasta. This is a crucial idea for culinary history, as a pasta historian would likely wish to find results about both. Unfortunately, most ontologies do not account for such linkages. However, FoodOn and WikiData get close in their semantic web-style focus on relationships between concepts.

These posts outline challenges and opportunities when considering common standards for sharing recipes and culinary data between food history researchers. Preexisting bibliographic structures of organization and discovery could allow food history databases to focus on food history instead of media classification. A taxonomy of subjects could be leveraged to standardize concepts. Ideally, this would be done by an open data source such as WikiData to make good use of community collaboration and existing infrastructure. The crux of the problem is that no existing ontology properly considers food historically, nor the complex cognitive connection and disconnection of food concepts.

As we have examined existing projects and culinary history corpora, we have repeatedly asked if data would be better off structured, unstructured, or just linked. Our view is that by primarily focusing on the relationships between and among concepts, whether structured or unstructured, any historical textual format could remain undisturbed while its metadata interlinked and vice versa. It’s time for digital culinary history to come into its own—it has all of the beginnings of a data-rich, analytical study. We feel that with just a little communication, coordination, and standard-setting, it could really cook.


  1. Craig Fox, “On Making Sense of Recipes,” HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies Volume 13, issue 38 (2020): 229–54. https://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/article/view/327.