Category Archives: Family and Household

The Poet’s Table: Recipes of the Sandburg Family

By Madi Duran

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. However, scanned copies of recipe cards provided by his daughter, Helga Sandburg Crile, and granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, for the reference files at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site show how Mrs. Lilian Sandburg integrated recipes learned from her Luxembourgian parents and ones honoring her husband Carl’s Swedish heritage into their lives. There are also instructions written by Mrs. Sandburg herself for making goat cheeses in various styles, like a simple cooked cheese and a nut Neufchâtel, and her well-used copy of The Settlement Cookbook (1901).

Fig. 1. Recipes for Oma’s grape wine and a dandelion wine, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

A recipe for dandelion wine points back to Mrs. Sandburg’s European immigrant parents, the Steichens. Dandelions were brought by European colonists in the 1600s, both as a source of edible greens and as a means to make a cheaper alternative to grape wine.[i] A grape wine recipe, passed down by “Oma,” the German word for grandmother and used by the Steichens to refer to Mrs. Sandburg’s mother, is accompanied by a note urging the recipient to “keep this in verry [sic] save [sic] place as it is verry [sic] good resepie [sic].” Another recipe for cold borscht is specifically labeled as coming from the Steichens, and a pound cake is also accompanied by “Oma” in parentheses.

Fig. 2. A collection of Swedish Christmas cookies copied at an unknown time, likely by Helga Sandburg Crile.
Fig. 3. A recipe for Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite German pfeffernüsse cookies, typed for the Park by her granddaughter Paula Steichen Polega in 1979.

When it comes to holiday fare, a variety of Swedish cookie recipes have been saved, an homage to Carl Sandburg’s Swedish heritage: Swedish butter cookies, spritsar, and one recipe card simply labeled “Swedish Christmas Cookies” that call for warming spices and molasses, like a gingerbread but without any ginger. However, Mrs. Sandburg’s heritage is evident in a much-beloved recipe for pfeffernüsse that her granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, passed on to the park with the remark that it was “Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite.” It seems only fitting that the family made efforts to reconnect with their heritage during the holidays, a time for celebration, togetherness, and remembrance.

Fig. 4. A recipe for “Connemara Custard” copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

The recipes documenting various uses for goat milk reflect Mrs. Sandburg’s dedication to bettering the dairy goat industry, including her own award-winning Chikaming Dairy herd, and desire to make goat milk a mainstream alternative for traditional dairy products. Even in basic recipes one can find evidence of her family’s flavor profile — anise and nutmeg appear in almost every cookie recipe, and anise makes an appearance in the recipe for cooked cheese written by Mrs. Sandburg. A custard recipe is modified into “Connemara Custard” by substituting goat milk for condensed milk. The recipe for a nut Neufchâtel, a cheese believed to date back to sixth-century Normandy,[ii] is also reimagined as a goat dairy product by Mrs. Sandburg from their days in Harbert, Michigan.

Fig. 5. A recipe for Nut Neufchatel goat cheese created by Mrs. Sandburg pre-1945 and distributed as part of her dairy goat operation, Chikaming Goat Farm, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

While we do not have many written recipes for the Sandburg family, what we do have illustrates how Mrs. Sandburg blended hers and her husband’s cultural backgrounds into memorable foods for her family and her ability to adapt recipes for her own health and benefit with goat dairy products. Some additional recipes used by the family can be found on a park webpage that references Lizzie Black Kander’s The Settlement Cookbook,[iii] a staple in the Sandburg home that can be seen in the kitchen in the historic house museum. Originally created for immigrants in Milwaukee, Kander’s work combined traditional Eastern European and American recipes.[iv] The use of this book also points to both the Sandburg and Steichen families’ lived experiences as European immigrants settling in the American Midwest — though they were in Illinois and Michigan, respectively, rather than Wisconsin. The use of The Settlement Cookbook, further exemplifies the efforts Mrs. Sandburg made to honor her and her husband’s European heritage and their lived experiences as first-generation Americans.

Figs. 6 and 7. Photographs of the Sandburgs’ copy of The Settlement Cookbook on display in their kitchen at Connemara.

At the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, we have a varied collection that shows a life well-lived. As the final home of an illustrious author, Connemara includes thousands of books on display and a large archival collection in our repository, but also, uniquely, the evidence of the Sandburgs’ mundane daily life, which sets it apart from other collections. Half-smoked cigars, tens of thousands of annotated bookmarks, and unfinished knitting projects are just some of the artifacts left behind by the Sandburg family. Recipes, too, tell a part of their story. Though the original recipe cards remain in the hands of descendants, the scanned copies in our reference files and the copy of The Settlement Cookbook reveal staples of the family’s diet as well as foods chosen for special occasions like Christmas, showcasing their values and heritage through their diet.


[i] Kate Dingwall, “Summery, Sweet and Refreshing: Get to Know Dandelion Wine,” Wine Enthusiast, May 17, 2024.

[ii] Ma. Luisa De Guzman, “Neufchatel Cheese,” What Cheese, March 5, 2024.

[iii] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.

[iv] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.


Madi Duran is a Museum Technician at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. She has had a love of museums ever since she was a child and has been volunteering and working at museums since she was in high school. In 2020 she graduated from St Olaf College with a degree in Art History, and went on to complete her master’s in Museum Studies through the University of Oklahoma’s online program in 2024. She started as an intern at the Carl Sandburg Home NHS in 2021 and began working as a National Park Service employee in 2024. She loves sharing information about the collection and Sandburg family with the public through the park’s official social media pages, speaking to visitors, assisting researchers, and sharing information through publications like this one!

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.

Students then swap their cards and examine their peer’s recipe. We start by thinking like rhetoricians, talking about the rhetorical form of modern recipes, meaning their components (title, ingredients, and instructions) and why they’re structured in this way, linking form to function.

From there, I talk about the history of this genre in North America—from oral traditions to commonplace books to cookbooks and the rise of nutritionism and level measurement—before suggesting something that I’ve written about in Melissa Goldthwaite’s anthology Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics: that recipes are embodied stories.

Considering recipes as stories leads us to think like anthropologists, examining our recipes as artifacts of culinary cultures—ones that reveal familial, ethnic, religious, economic, and agricultural traditions and values. We also discuss how recipes produce bodies: the writer’s, of course, but also ancestral and future bodies and even the reader’s body should they make the dish. As Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster argue so well in The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, “The recipe. . .[puts] the reader in contact with the writer, making personal connections with a cultural moment or a community, and allowing the reader to interpolate [themselves] into the text, making the narrative [their] own.”

Importantly, though, we also discuss how recipes can exclude as well as include, coding certain bodies as other and/or usurping aspects of someone else’s culinary culture without giving them credit. In the U.S., that might mean erasing the origins of recipes, as has happened repeatedly to Black women who, as Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her book The Jemima Code, “did much of the cooking in early American kitchens.” Similar erasures and exclusions have occurred with recipes first developed by Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian communities.     

In every food-based class I teach, I encourage learning that’s sensory, creative, and collaborative. And so I do the assignments alongside my students, including this exercise. For the recipe I know by heart, I use my paternal grandmother’s for banana bread—one she snail-mailed to me when I was a graduate student, suggesting I could save money by repurposing blackened bananas into a “Delicious Treat!”

Many of my best-beloved recipes come from this grandmother, Nellie “Peg” Cognard. When Peg died in 2004 at the age of 89, my father asked if I wanted anything of hers. Immediately I said, “her recipe box”—which is actually a 1970s index-card organizer, 14 inches long and missing a lid. This unassuming container holds around 1400 recipe cards, spattered with grease and mostly written in my grandmother’s hand: an archive of her cooking culture, particularly among her fellow homemakers in Omaha, Nebraska. These recipe cards range from the 1940s through the mid-80s, when my Grandma and Grandpa Cognard moved to Texas, far from brisk Nebraska winters.

Grandma Peg’s 1400 recipes are for mid-century midwestern delicacies such as Ham Loaf, Hamburger Pie, Butterhorn Rolls, Waldorf Astoria Salad, Dump Cake, Milky Way Cake, and my father’s favorite, Toll House Cookies with Oatmeal.

Fig. 1. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.
Fig. 2. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

On the second day of “Books that Cook,” I bring in loaves of Grandma Peg’s banana bread along with the entire “Desserts” section of her recipe box. As I hand out fistfuls of cards, I tell them that, today, we’re going to think like historians.

The first thing students notice is the handwriting, a slanting cursive with looping O’s and tight S’s. They enjoy the tactility: the bodily trace of Grandma Peg as their thumbs brush over her words—which is part of what turns such functional texts into heirlooms.

Then they notice the names. While my grandmother made all these dishes herself, she gave other cooks their due, writing their name in the corner. Most recipes came to my grandma by way of friends in her United Methodist women’s group—including her closest friend Gen May—or from family members, such as her daughter Shirley or my mother Anne. This practice of attribution underscores the collaborative nature of my grandma’s cooking circle, while also building an archive of communal knowledge.

Fig. 3. Recipe Attributions. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

Students are also struck by the distinct modalities of the cards, which reveal how twentieth-century American cooking was influenced by the rise of consumer culture—in everything from the abundance and branding of processed foods (e.g., Angel-flake coconut) to the personalized recipe cards. They also note profound shifts in communication technologies, with some recipes plunked out on a typewriter and others cut-and-pasted from newspapers or magazines.

Fig. 4. Recipe Card Modalities. Image Credit: Personal Collection

What becomes clear through our historical analysis is that these stay-at-home women forged a kind of amateur professionalism as home cooks. Their recipe exchanges gave them agency, community, and sometimes celebrity; a woman could build a reputation on her perfect ice-box cakes.

As our conclusion to this work—and to set up future class discussions—I then bring out some of Grandma Peg’s recipe cards from beyond the “Desserts” section, including ones for Oriental Tuna Salad, Old Virginia Peanut Soup, Taiwanese Special, Dead Bread (“Pan de Muerto”), and Poor Man’s Liver Paté. Why? Because my grandmother’s recipes are products of the politics, economy, and social hierarchies of her day, and ephemera such as handwritten recipes record it all: not just how food can create belonging, but how culinary cultures can appropriate and exclude as well. As Abby M. Dubisar puts it in her article on “Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity,” through cookbooks—but also through caches of handwritten recipes—“white stories about race and class and food…are maintained.”

Fig. 5. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection
Fig. 6. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection

Beginning my “Books that Cook” classes with this personal recipe collection accomplishes a number of pedagogical goals. It asks students to think critically through distinct disciplinary lenses. It also asks them to think with their bodies as they touch and taste history, handling these cards and eating a slice of Grandma Peg’s banana bread. And, finally, it asks that they consider the complexity of cooking communities in light of identity and inequality.

At the end of our first week, I ask everyone to take their peer’s recipe home and turn it into the page of a cookbook using old-school tools: pens and markers, tape and glue. By week two, these pages become a class cookbook zine. I scan their pages and add a cover, epigraph, and table of contents before making hard copies for everyone—which accomplishes yet another pedagogical goal (and perhaps the one that’s most important to me): starting our own culinary community.


Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college fastened to a shore in Southern Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia and the Netherlands, she received the 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, considered the “Nobel Prize” for teachers. Jennifer is the author or co-editor of six books, including Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014) and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (NYUP 2024), both with her long-time collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Jennifer also publishes essays and short fiction, and she’s produced various lecture series for The Great Courses and Audible, including an Audible Original titled “Books that Cook: Food & Fiction” (2021).

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. For inspiration, we examined creative works such as Joanna Scott’s essay, “Stuffed Peppers (A Recipe for Beauty),” and Nancy Willard’s poem, “How to Stuff a Pepper,” alongside traditional cookbook recipes. We reached consensus that a written recipe must have 1) a descriptive, perhaps also enticing, title; 2) a list of ingredients with measurements; and 3) procedural instructions. A recipe’s voice should be imperative, directing an understood subject to perform a series of tasks chronologically. We left little to chance. We knew, with certainty, what made a recipe a recipe.

A few years later, exploration of my late grandmother’s recipe collection unsettled my confidence in recipe conventions. Married in 1950 to a WWII veteran who built the postwar ranch home where they raised their five children, my grandmother presided over a spacious and well-equipped kitchen that included a Tappan Model RL-1 microwave oven, the first of its kind manufactured for home use. The influence of packaged convenience foods was strong in her oeuvre—I fondly recall mac and cheese made from “scratch” with Velveeta and pressed Christmas cookies tinted with Jell-O powder, as well as Pennsylvania Dutch classics like brothy beef with egg noodles for Sunday dinner. In addition to a modest shelf of cookbooks, she kept recipes in a small tin box adorned with folksy birds, flowers, and strawberries. It housed a thick deck of 3.5” x 5” cards inscribed in tidy cursive, plus clippings from magazines and newspapers, tucked between tabbed alphabetical dividers. Surprisingly, only a handful of recipes in the box were recognizable to me—Jell-O cookies, thick sugar cutout cookies, and Depression-era ‘Wacky Cake’ among them. Rather than being the written record of my grandmother’s signature dishes, this collection felt more like an aspirational Pinterest board of possibilities.

But more intriguingly, this time capsule of cookery also revealed an apparent disregard for method. Many of my grandmother’s handwritten recipes consisted of a title and ingredient list—some, an ingredient list alone! Perhaps in the spirit of efficiency, she omitted the obvious, knowing she would require only a reminder of what to combine. Upon reflection, this made perfect sense; when I was first living on my own, I phoned my grandmother to ask for her potato salad recipe. She was highly amused at the request. She told me to boil some potatoes and eggs, cube them, then chop celery and make a dressing. She would fondly laugh about that for years to come; for her, potato salad wasn’t the sort of thing that required a recipe.

Fig. 1. “Beans” recipe card handwritten by Marcella Muri Conrad (1929-2012). Image courtesy of the author.

I was delighted to discover a card titled “Beans,” which I assumed must be the saucy terra cotta-colored baked beans we ate at every summer picnic alongside that off-the-record potato salad. The card bore a cryptic list of ingredients and no method. It started with “2 tlbs [sic] syrup.” Maple syrup, I assumed. The next ingredient was “1/2 juice.” Juice of what? Fruit juice for sweetness, perhaps. Or maybe “juice” referred to the cooking liquid from the beans? Half of what measure—a 1/2 cup? Half of what remained once the beans were cooked? “One onion” was fairly straightforward, but “1/2 jar ketchup” left me estimating by memory the volume of the thick glass Heinz bottles of my youth. “2 tbls vinegar, 1/2 tsp dry mustard, 6 tbls brown sugar, and 2 tsp salt” rounded out the list. No mention was made of the bacon or ham that gave textural contrast to the small, velvety beans. Furthermore, this recipe for “Beans” made no mention of beans beyond the title. No variety or quantity of beans, no indication of dry or canned, no cooking time or temperature. 

My attempt at parsing this card and recreating the beans of my youth was a flop, but a flop with an important lesson to impart. A published recipe is a set of instructions for the unfamiliar or uncertain; it aims to contain all the knowledge required to produce a dish. A personal recipe card, however, may function more as a prompt—a series of nudges recorded by and for a single cook. The knowledge lives at the intersection of the text and the reader who knows how to interpret it.

As a composition instructor, I had generalized all recipes into a written genre based on the conventions of recipes published in books. But as a home cook who inherited someone else’s collection, I realized that what initially felt like a series of accidental absences were actually deliberate ellipses; my grandmother’s embodied knowledge filled in the blanks. The farther a recipe must travel—across time, borders, cooks, kitchens—the more comprehensive it must become. My grandmother’s bean recipe was never intended to journey beyond her stovetop. For those who inherit or study personal recipe collections, it may be easy to read an ellipsis as an omission, but to do so is to misinterpret the archive—to miss evidence of tacit wisdom that once lived beyond the card.

Fig. 2. The beans at a Sunday dinner in Summer 2001, adjacent to the elusive potato salad. Image courtesy of the author.

Dr. Sarah Conrad Gothie is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar and educator. She holds a PhD in American Culture, with a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Damsons: An Ancient Fruit in the Modern Kitchen (Prospect Books, 2018) and food essays including “Pandemic Pantry in the Big Woods: A Quest for Certainty During COVID-19” in DIGEST and “No Food or Drink in the Museum?: The Challenges of Edible Artifacts” in The Food and Folklore Reader. Her current food studies project is a work of middle grade narrative nonfiction that introduces readers ages 8-12 to culinary history through the life and legacy of Janice Bluestein Longone, a woman whose curiosity, generosity, and persistence helped shape the academic study of food in the United States. She teaches academic and creative writing at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, PA, and posts about food, museums, reading, and gardening on Instagram: @sarahconradgothie

“From the Dear-Times”; What a Scrapbook Can Tell Us of Household Management in Wartime

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.[i] 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.

Fig. 1. Marie Prytz photographed in 1919; around the time she gathered her recipe collection. From left the two men is Marie’s husband Proff. Carl V. Prytz and Marius Hansen, a former prisoner of war returning from England on his way home to the (then German) southern part of Denmark. Image courtesy of Gentofte Municipality Archive.

Although Denmark remained neutral during the war, the national economy was strained and imports dwindled.[ii] The average Danish household had to face shortages, rationing, and unprecedented inflation.[iii] The Prytz household was well-off, but with eight children and a good deal of civic sense (Marie was elected to the municipal council in 1928), the rational use of commodities would have been an important matter to her.

The first page in the notebook is dedicated to an index categorizing the different recipes. There are the more general categories, such as “Drying of fruit” and “Marmalades.” But more timely categories also appear, including “War-butter” or “Barley bread” (barley being used as a wheat substitute).[iv] These consist of several clippings and notes describing different recipes and methods for the same food or dish.

There are many recipes for ersatz products including substitute butter, potato starch, and gelatine. Notably, the book includes seven different recipes for “war-time butter.” One calls for mixing ½ kg butter, 1 litre of whole milk, some flour, and “butter-coloring,” thereby producing 1.5 kg of butter. The many different recipes for this item underscore the importance of butter in the Danish kitchen at the time. For comparison, the collection contains only two recipes for ersatz coffee.

The book has no stains that suggest actual use in the kitchen, but handwritten notes and underlining point to it having been consulted and revised. For example, in the printed instructions for bottling, the description of covering the opening with parchment paper is supplemented with a handwritten note that the parchment should be scalded (probably to avoid molding). Additionally, in a magazine clipping that describes how to salt herring but lacks precise measurements, these are added in handwriting. The various recipes for the same dish and the handwritten notes give the impression that the book was meant for gathering a broader range of knowledge and not just as a practical manual.

Prytz’s book also contains clippings on salting, smoking, drying, pickling, canning, and bottling vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish. There is a clear difference in how comprehensive these categories are: preserving berries and fruit by making marmalade only consists of two clippings, which mainly describes how to use less sugar. Some handwritten notes offer tips on fruits and berries that mix well together; marmalade of pear “tastes of nothing,” but it could be mixed with quince, which also called for less sugar.

Fig. 2. Page showing directions for drying of among others rhubarb, rosehip, and apple. The handwritten note on the lower left side lists leaves that can be used for tea. (Picture from Gentofte Municipality Archive).


In contrast, canning of vegetables and even meat is described in more detail. There are also many clippings about drying; airdrying, drying in an oven, or drying over a heating-stove has detailed descriptions, and Prytz has carefully underlined the passages, which she, one can imagine, found especially useful. This indicates that jam-making was a skill that she and other homemakers were expected to have some prior knowledge of, whereas the practice of preserving other produce and using other methods was less familiar to the urban homemaker. This is perhaps unsurprising as cooking in the early twentieth century, and especially in cities, had been moving away from home production and towards store-bought consumption. But rationing and scarcity meant a renewed focus on self-sufficiency.

Fig. 3. Cover of Marie Prytz collection (Picture from Gentofte Municipality Archive).

Homemakers in wealthy homes might not have felt the scarcity quite as much as those in working-class households, who were advised to replace meat with margarine and generally consume more plant-based goods.[v] But many, like Marie Prytz, felt a social responsibility to alter their consumption. Prytz’s scrapbook reveals wartime crisis management in a wealthy household and how a systematic and pragmatic homemaker dealt with the challenges through meticulously gathering and testing of data.

[i] Gentofte Municipality Archive, private archive concerning Marie Prytz, A122, lb.nr.: 4.1, Udklip med opskrifter “fra Dyrtiden”, 1915-1920.

[ii] Haastrup, Lisbeth, Hjemmegrisen, ”Første Verdenskrig Ved Tunestillingen: Forsvarsvilje Og Hverdagsliv”, Greve Museum, 2010.

[iii] Statistisk Aarbog 1922, Danmarks Statistik, www.dst.dk (30-03-2024).

[iv] Adriansen, Inge, ”Krigskost og ernæring”, Dansk Madhistorie. Mad i krig og krise, 2014.

[v] Halse, Sven, og Daniel Henschen, Mikkel Hindhede: Og Kampen Om Danskernes Kost, Aarhus University Press, 2020.


Anna Katrine Werge Bønnelycke holds a MA in History from the University of Copenhagen. She works as an archivist at Gentofte Municipality Archive. Her personal and archival interests include personal recipe collections, local history, historical cooking in practice, and the traditions of gingerbread.