Category Archives: Knowledge Transmission

Preparedness for the Unexpected: Expedient Recipes for Survival in Wartime China

By Chang Xu

If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text wasn’t intended solely for military use, despite what its title suggests. In the preface, the compiler Luo Shiyao explained that the collection grew out of his personal encounters with everyday illnesses.[i] His project belonged to a longer literati tradition in which scholars compiled and published practical encyclopedias and daily-use compendia, creating their own textual museums of useful knowledge. Since disease during military campaigns could be especially debilitating, as Luo observed, remedies proven effective under such extreme conditions then held particular value for the wider public, meeting an urgent need for survival in wartime.[ii]

Black-and-white text fills a page of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches.
Fig. 1. Preface of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches. Digitized and online at Google Books, URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/行軍方便便方/hylWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en.

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The manual contains 679 recipes, organized into six sections (see Table 1). What began as a personal collection of useful prescriptions unexpectedly revealed the remarkable efficacy of “expedient recipes” (bianfang). These recipes arguably relied only on ingredients that were familiar and accessible to readers: beans, chestnuts, vegetables, tea, and other mundane materials. They didn’t require rare or costly components, nor did they depend on professional diagnoses or individualized modification. Yet, when followed as directed, they consistently produced immediate, reliable results. In effect, the manual empowered its users to be their own doctors, as Yi-Li Wu also noticed in the case of women’s medicine.

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Section # of recipes
Preparedness for the Unexpected 26
Preventive Defense 45
Treating Injuries 117
Curing Illnesses 309
Rescue and Relief 71
Miscellaneous Addenda 111
  Total: 679

Fittingly, most of the recipes focus on treating injuries and illnesses, reflecting the compilation’s original purpose. But it is the recipes for preparing food and drink for the unexpected that appear first—framing the two as the foundation of survival. To underscore this point, Luo drew on a grim catalog of historical episodes, including accounts of cannibalism during sieges and famine, to convey the urgency of such knowledge.[iii] In response, he assembled a diverse range of recipes from pharmacopeias, medical texts, and agriculture manuals, offering practical strategies for preserving food, reducing consumption, identifying substitutes, and finding safe drinking water.

The first group of recipes, all titled “Method for Avoiding Grain and Preventing Hunger During Military Marches,” offers strategies for reducing food intake while sustaining the body during prolonged periods of deprivation. One of them reads:

Astragalus root (huangqi), 3 qian (approximately 11.19g)

Red halloysite clay (chi shizhi), 3 qian

Dragon bone (fossilized bone), 3 qian

Siler root (fangfeng), 5 fen (approximately 1.9g)

Processed aconite root (wutou), 1 qian (approximately 3.73g)

Roast [the ingredients] until dry, then pound in a stone mortar one thousand times. Refine [the resulting powder] with honey to form bullet-sized pills. When traveling urgently with no time to prepare food, eat a full meal of rice beforehand, then take one pill to sustain a journey of 500 li (approximately 165 miles). Two pills will keep you going for 1,000 li.[iv]

For readers who found the ingredients in this recipe uncommon or difficult to obtain, the manual offers more accessible alternatives. One recipe, for instance, recommends steaming asplenium trichomanes (tiejiao fengwei cao; literally, iron-foot phoenix-tail grass) together with black beans. Eating five to seven of these infused beans is said to keep hunger at bay for an entire day.[v]

Fig. 2. Asplenium trichomanes from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé;s Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond simply reducing food intake, some recipes go further by offering ways to transform inedible materials into food. One recipe, quoted from the renowned pharmacopeia Ben cao gang mu (Systematic Materia Medica), describes how to render rock edible:

Gather white stones from mountain streams, and boil them in juice from scallions or with the root of sanguisorba officinalis (diyu). Once cooked, they become as soft as taro and can serve as a hunger remedy. This is called “stone soup” (shigeng).[vi]

Likely originating in Daoist texts, “stone stops” carried cultural weight in literati writings and poetry as part of the cuisines of transcendence. While Daoist sources emphasized absorbing the qi of stones produced through this cooking method, Luo’s inclusion of this recipe highlights its practical utility rather than its association with longevity-inducing nourishment found in other texts. [vii]

Food poisoning was another major concern addressed in the treatise. As Luo noted, there are cases where troops suffered from consuming poor food, resulting in swelling, shortness of breath, and death. In the “Rescue and Relief” section, therefore, he gathered guidance on identifying toxic plants and animals, as well as detecting contaminated water and spoiled fruits. He warned that if a dead animal’s mouth remains closed, its liver appears dark, or its flesh is marked with black spots, the meat should not be consumed.[viii] In this part of the collection, the focus shifts from treating the ill to equipping readers with the knowledge to avoid contaminated food in the first place.

Luo Shiyao’s effort to compile practical knowledge parallels the work of late Ming scholars who sought to collect and classify natural objects, as Benjamin Elman has discussed. Amid the twin crises of warfare and illness, Luo’s manual offered not only remedies but also a structure for navigating chaos, something tangible readers could hold onto. By using recipes, Luo drew on what Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata have identified as the strengths of medical formulars in transmitting knowledge: their modularity and experiential basis made them easy to adapt and share.[ix] Yet such recipes typically required learned physicians to turn a generic formula into a specific prescription. Luo’s collection attempted to break from that model. His emphasis on expediency—on accessibility, broad applicability, and consistent outcomes—shifted the power of care from professional practices to ordinary individuals. It was a solitary act of hope, an effort to make order out of chaos, and to leave behind something enduring when so much had already been lost.

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[i] The author did not specify the types of illnesses he had experience in the preface. However, based on the section “Curing Illnesses,” the compilation addresses various conditions such as coughing, colds, diarrhea, headaches, toothaches, lower back pain, as well as ulcers and skin diseases.

[ii] Luo Shiyao羅世瑤, Xingjun fangbian bianfang 行军方便便方Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852), Preface, 1a.

[iii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Preface, 1b.

[iv] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[v] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[vi] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[vii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[viii] One of the example could be found in Lin Hong 林洪 (1127-1279), “Bai shigeng” 白石羹 (White Stone Stop), in Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling, https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%85%E4%BE%9B.

[ix] Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 20. https://doi.org/10.1086/691411.

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Chang Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research interests cover the global history of medicine, the history of military technologies, and the interconnections between human and non-human bodies. She is currently working on a monograph derived from her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis, which examines medical practices in military organizations during the Qing’s territorial expansion.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.

“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.

Activists packing up bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis
Sourdough loaves stenciled with phrases about abortion access. These loaves were photographed and then printed as ephemera in the bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis

Numerous scholars agree that recipes are a type of feminist discourse, and a “particularly feminine way of knowing and sharing knowledge.”[1]  Importantly, these crowd-sourced books also helped to spread information to other women, at times subversively and at others loudly. As Carrie Helms Tippen explains, “Recipes, and by extension cookbooks, are narratives that focus on silenced women and challenge phallocentric methods of writing history.”[2] It stands to reason, this rewriting also serves to create safer spaces for the sharing of other women-centered knowledge, including information related to reproductive health.

For many generations, reproductive health has been both an incredibly personal topic and      socially taboo subject. There are likely countless “recipes” for abortions in addition to instructions for providing post-procedure nourishment and care tucked away in unpublished manuscripts and personal correspondence – two historically important forms of media used by women to share food knowledge. Before the technological advancements of modern gynecology, when reproductive healthcare carried different political implications, women passed information to one another. This information frequently took the form of a recipe and used ingredients women often grew at home or that grew nearby. argues that women often collected and shared recipes based on herbal medicinal traditions of the time period and “were expected to have general medical knowledge in order to fulfill their Christian duties as wives, mothers, and caregivers, both within the home and the community.” [3]

Centuries later, despite advancements in printing technologies and progress for women’s political agency, the knowledge of reproductive care recipes continues to be shared using subversive and community-aligned methods such as zines, ephemeral pamphlets, and booklets. After the increasing threats to abortion access levied by the Trump Administration starting in 2016, and then the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in no constitutional protection of abortion access, activists across the nation published updated or reprinted reproductive care “cookbooks.”

The recipe format serves as both a commonly-known narrative device and a respected method of knowledge sharing amongst women. Modern reproductive care texts tend to feature one or a combination of “recipes” for at-home abortions using specific emmenagogue herbs or medicines, including mifepristone and misoprostol, in addition to more traditional recipes and meal guides for providing nourishment and care for those who have experienced an abortion. Zines including “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed” (published by Holistic Abortions) and “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists” by Catherine Marie Jeunet include herbal recipes as well as short historical overviews of herbal abortifacient histories. The second issue of Wildseed Feminism focuses on herbal remedies “for Lifelong Reproductive Care” and includes recipes to manage “uncomfortable symptoms relating to PMS, periods, pregnancy, and perimenopause.”

Cover of Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom. Image Credit: Microcosm Publishing
Cover of Cooking Up Trouble. Image Credit: Leela Cyd and Anne Parker

Using a combination of community knowledge sharing with fundraising, the Breadbox project, founded by social activist artist Borealis, “averts high tech surveillance through a multi-modal constellation of access points.” And much like other recipe collections, “no two installations, video presentations, bread bags, or conversations associated with this project are exactly the same; the project travels and evolves as social conditions require.” Each bag includes a small pile of ephemera, so similar to the small recipe leaflets that once accompanied early 20th century appliances and popular grocery store ingredients, with state-specific reproductive health care information, all-options phone numbers, colorful zines, and lists of action-items for supporting abortion access. One zine entitled “Medication Abortion” ends with a short section on “support” advising readers to consider “making food in advance (soups, broths, warm & easy to digest, simple snacks)” or asking someone else to cook for them.

The back of the North Carolina bread bag. Image Credit: Borealis

A larger booklet entitled pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release, artfully riso-printed in hot pink and brown, features a section on creating a care plan with the “universal things people need when they are bleeding through menstruation, miscarriage, or abortion: nutrition, rest, warmth, and community.” The booklet’s title is a play on the French phrase for sourdough (pain au levain) and the normal, but painful side effects of the abortion process. An additional layer of meaning to the phrase, refers to the painstaking process women face to access basic reproductive care in modern day America.

Much like any other community cookbook old or new, these reproductive health care texts continue the practice of supporting a network of women with resources, respect, and acknowledgement. The recipes serve a different purpose than a gifted baked good or a weeknight casserole; instead, they exist as an integral political medium of knowledge sharing and community in the precarious reproductive health care landscape of contemporary America. As the bright yellow tag on the Bread Bag reads: “We share our resources for the common good.”

[1] Carrie Helms Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 18.

[2] Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories,” 18.

[3] Ashley Buchanan, “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control,” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

REFERENCES:

Borealis. pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release. (self-pub.,  2022).

Borealis. Bread Box Project. https://beaux.studio/breadbox.

Buchanan, Ashley. “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control.” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

Cyd, Leela and Anne Parker. Cooking Up Trouble: Recipes to Nourish Women  (self-pub.,  2016).

Helms Tippen, Carrie. “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 15-29. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.

Holistic Abortions. “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed.” Red Hook Collective, 2021.

Jeunet, Catherine Marie. “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists.” Eberhardt Press, 2009 (reprinted through 2019).

Dr. KC Hysmith is a writer, food scholar, and historical recipe developer. She holds an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University and PhD in American Studies focusing on food and culture from the University of North Carolina. Her dissertation, “#FOODHERSTORY: Food and American Women’s Political Resistance from Suffrage to the Digital Age,” investigated the legacy and power of women’s food history. She is the editor and co-editor of Edible North Carolina (UNC Press 2022), An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming), and When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen, forthcoming). Find more of her work on TikTok (@foodherstory) and on Instagram (@kchysmith). Find more of her work here: https://www.kchysmith.com/

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.