Category Archives: Records, Documents and Notes

American Studies, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Teaching Resources, Women and Gender

Teaching Grandma Peg’s Recipes

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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).

Family and Household, Food and Drink, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

A Recipe for Beans (Without the Beans)

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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

18th Century, Culinary History, Manuscripts, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

Folding and Pinning: Organization in Two Eighteenth-Century Swedish Recipe Collections

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By Isabelle Fredborg


4 äggegulor 1 jungfru grädda 6 lod såcker ett hön ägg smör

What called for 4 egg yolks, 8 centiliters of cream, 80 grams of sugar and butter the size of a hen’s egg? With both the title and method missing, I assumed it to be some type of pastry, based on its surrounding recipes. Even after having studied some forty Swedish recipe collections from the eighteenth century, I was not used to this type of guesswork. I had seen both manuscript cookbooks carefully written as prestigious gifts as well as those assembled for personal use and filled with furious scribbles. But opening this archival folder, I was surprised by a thick bunch of sheets of various sizes and colors. Carefully picking up a small sheet, I was struck by not just its dark ink, but also the traces of how it had been folded and the clusters of small holes.

The two collections of the Esplunda archive (Riksarkivet Marieberg, Sweden) are attributed to the Swedish countesses Lovisa Ulrika Horn and her daughter-in-law Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld, both of whom married into the Mörner family. They enjoyed a life close to the power of the Royal court, with a strong social network and considerable financial means. Both Horn’s and Heijkenskjöld’s collections survive as bunches of loose recipe sheets and a few sewn booklets – very different from the leather-bound volumes I had previously examined.

The collections show signs of having grown over time, through many hands and on whatever paper was available. Numerous hands had contributed to both collections, in penmanship styles ranging from the second half of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Some recipes carried attribution from other countesses. The variety of paper sizes, colors and qualities suggested not just that recipes came from outside the household, but that they were sometimes written on whatever paper was at hand, including one sheet with a black border, revealing the paper’s past as a condolence letter. Most sheets showed clear signs of having been folded, sometimes to the point of tearing. The folded size is slightly larger than a modern business card.

Most small and mid-sized sheets were perforated with small holes. In the Horn collection, a few remaining pins suggested two reasons for the pin holes. One pin keeps two separate recipe sheets pinned together, binding a recipe for butter pretzels with brewing instructions. Another recipe, on clarifying tallow, shows how notes could be extended with an additional sheet when more space was needed for the instructions.

 
Fig. 1. Pins keeping two recipes together (left) and extending a recipe (right). Lovisa Ulrika Horn’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:117, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

 

Some papers had been sewn into booklets with needle and thread, often organised around a theme, such as compotes and puddings or flavoured spirits. In Heijkenskjöld’s collection, one such booklet stood out by mostly featuring lists of ingredients with measurements, sometimes with a title – Mandeltorta, “Almond torte”, Bakelse, “Pastry”, and Buding, “Pudding” – but no instructions.

A few pages featured small, folded notes pinned to them, revealing additional ingredient lists and measurements but no instructions, title or method. The unknown pastry from the beginning of this article was one of them. Based on the many holes, these notes had been pinned, removed, and re-pinned repeatedly, suggesting active use or perhaps a favorite recipe. Instead of providing clear instructions, this type of note functioned as a prompt for someone who had the necessary skill and experience to make the recipe and only needed to be reminded of the proportions. What was worth writing down was only what could not be remembered.

Fig. 2. Two recipe notes without title or method, pinned onto a booklet page with many holes. Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:191, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

 

In both collections, the pin functioned as a tool encouraging flexibility and mobility, a mobility hinted at by the folded size of the sheets. Small enough to fit into one of the pockets commonly used in eighteenth-century women’s dress, recipes could be transported between rooms, tucked away mid-task, or sent by post between friends and acquaintances. The pinning allowed its owner to organize groupings, with certain recipes clustered together for a season, a dinner, or a particular task, then detached and returned to the collection. The pin was the system’s adjustable element, making the collection physically editable in a way a bound book never could be. The folding and pinning suggested not a collection assembled for show or instruction, but one in constant, practical use by women who already knew what they were doing.

Isabelle Fredborg is a master’s student in ethnology at Umeå University, with a focus on eighteenth-century Swedish recipe manuscripts. She runs Project Henrika, which digitizes, transcribes, and publishes these manuscripts to make them accessible for research.

Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

Side Dishes and Supplemented Reading: Sammelrezepte in West German Women’s Magazines

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By Ellen Barth

The recipes from aunts, the paper, and friends,

that have been collected over years without end,

often lie in a box out of view,

lost to the clutter and daily rush, too.

But that should not happen, not anymore—

we’re hoping to make it less of a chore.

This little folder here is just the right book,

filled with good recipes ready to cook.

The above poem, loosely translated from the original German, appears in a recipe booklet by the food seasoning company Maggi, published sometime in the 1950s. The poem positions traditional handwritten recipe cards as disorganized, ephemeral, and—at least implicitly—old-fashioned. The booklet, on the other hand, is printed and conveniently punched with holes so that it could be included in a binder, perhaps one full of such branded, promotional recipes.

Around the same time that food companies like Maggi were nudging cooks to rely less on manuscript recipes handed down through generations and more on their printed output, women’s magazines in West Germany (1949-1990) were also turning the collection of magazine recipes into a marketing tool by encouraging readers to collect and bind printed recipes in new ways.    

A striking example of how women’s magazines tied recipes to the practice of collecting appears in Petra: Die moderne Frau, first published in 1964 and, at that time, one of only two monthly women’s magazines in West Germany. As well as giving advice on fashion, home decoration, and beauty products, cooking was a common element of Petra. However, in the early issues, few recipes were included in the magazine’s pages. Instead, during the 1960s, Petra readers received a separate recipe supplement with each issue. These supplements, numbered and with changing themes, could be collected and bound in a Petra binder—an advertisement for which can be found on the back cover of the June 1967 supplement.

Fig. 1. Image courtesy of the author.

Magazines have often inspired collecting behavior, being a lesser acknowledged branch on the book collecting tree. In Germany as well as other countries, magazines on various topics have sold branded binders that could hold multiple periodical issues together, a practice that dates back at least to the nineteenth century and the “strap file and binder” format. Examples of this from German magazines include Auto Motor und Sport, Funkschau, and the pornographic Frivol, all of which have sold branded Sammelmappe (collection binders) for collecting their issues, with affordances listed as keeping issues neatly together, attractiveness, and, in the case of Frivol, a neutral spine that did not reveal the contents.

Petra’s binders for collecting recipe supplements offered their readers a new twist on this old collector’s classic. Writing about the purpose of printed supplements, Yanick Rice Lamb states that these “were often intended to infuse spice […] and provide added value[.]” In German, this metaphor is especially apt, considering that the word for supplement (Beilage) is the same as the word for an edible side dish. As well as adding “spice” through additional content in the form of cooking advice, the supplements were used by Petra’s publishers to turn readers into collectors and offered an alternative way to engage with the magazine.

Fig. 2. Image courtesy of the author.

Into the 1970s, Petra’s recipe supplements disappeared but the collection of recipes nevertheless remained. Collectible Sammelrezepte were printed in the magazine’s pages with pictures of the dishes on one side and recipes on the other, often with four recipes on a single page. The recipes were meant to be cut out—helpfully marked with an icon of an open pair of scissors and dashed lines—and then gathered and bound in a Petra-branded binder. In this reader-to-collector strategy, Petra was not alone. In the 1970s and 80s, the magazine Brigitte also published Sammelrezepte and sold its own branded recipe binder—the Brigitte Rezeptbuch—with the added benefit of organizational dividers based on food type.

Vintage binders filled with cut-out magazine recipes are somewhat rare to find (they themselves are not yet viewed as valuable collector’s items), but surviving examples attest to how these collections incentivized regular magazine purchases, extending and deepening engagement in a kind of brand-oriented practice of reading, curating, and collecting. The examples from my own private collection—one purchased online and one found at a free little bookshelf—demonstrate media loyalty, with each only including recipes from their respective magazines. The organization of those recipes is, however, a more personal and creative matter. Although the Brigitte binder suggests a specific organizational structure through the inclusion of dividers, how the individual reader interprets—or perhaps ignores—those categories is up to them: for example, the collector who chose to put the recipe for pizza in the baked goods section next to sweet Quarkstollen, presumably because it is cooked in the oven.

Fig. 3. Image courtesy of the author.

Although this kind of collecting and organizing of recipes may have little in common with the rhetorical remix prominent in recipe notecards and scrapbooks, it nonetheless reflects an active engagement with and remixing of mass media. Through magazine supplements, printed recipes, and branded binders, West German women participated as readers, cooks, and collectors to create unique recipe books that blended mass culture with personal taste.

Ellen Barth works at the Chair of Book Studies, University of Münster. Her monograph Contradictory Cookbooks: Print, Protest, and Feminism in Women’s Community Cookbooks will be published by the University of Georgia Press in late 2026, and she has also published research on the topics of feminist craftivism, menstrual activism, and political cookbooks. Originally from the United States, she now resides in Germany.