Category Archives: Spring 2026

Culinary Literacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Personal Recipe Collections

By Elizabeth M. Schmidt

When I graduated from college in 2011, my cousin Aurora gave me a cookbook she had compiled. Titled “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” it was a binder filled with her favorite recipes: some she wrote herself and others she collected from friends online. Over the years, I added to the binder, slipping magazine cutouts between the pages and taping in small pieces of note paper on which I had scribbled instructions. The cookbook Aurora gave me is part of a long tradition of personal recipe collections created by, and for, women. These collections can be found in kitchens, attics, drawers, libraries, and archives around the world. As readers of The Recipes Project will know, historians have found recipes useful for thinking about how and what households ate, and they are often prized for their access to women’s voices and perspectives.

The varied nature of these collections make them tricky to catalog, and the lack of information on the compilers is often perplexing. An eighteenth-century recipe collection by Elizabeth Michel, currently housed at the Wellcome Library, was initially catalogued by someone around 1931 who referred to Michel as “illiterate,” even though the book was clearly written by someone familiar with the written word and educated to some degree. In 2010, literary historian Wendy Wall used this cookbook and catalog entry as the impetus for an essay that confronted the question of literacy in relation to what she called “the domestic arts,” specifically pointing out the ways that literacy is often unfairly gendered.[1]

What I want to make clear is that the people building these recipe collections were both compilers and authors. Women like Michel were acting as compilers by collecting recipes from various sources, but also as writers by modifying the recipes they collected and creating the books themselves. This became evident when I initially began researching personal recipe collections and wanted to find evidence of real-world use of published cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like many, I have shelves of cookbooks that I have collected but rarely cooked from. I wanted to know if this was the case centuries earlier: if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were also collector pieces rather than used on a regular basis. In two nineteenth-century manuscripts I found explicit evidence of engagement with a published book. In the cookbook collection at Texas Woman’s University’s Blagg-Huey Library was a recipe book by Mrs. E. A. Foord, an author who copied out a “Claret Cup” recipe from Isabella Beeton’s 1865 book The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery. Then, at the Huntington Library, I found a recipe collection written by Susannah Judith Blencowe which included the following note: “For Oyster Sauce refer to Miss Rundell page 320 Calves foot jelly Mrs. Glasse page 295 Carrot Soup Cobbet’s 131,” referencing Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1842), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1784), and Anne Cobbett’s The English Housekeeper: or, Manual of Domestic Management (1840).

These were certainly classic examples of literacy, but what I found in the rest of the pages of Foord and Blencowe’s collections, as well as in countless other manuscripts I examined, were examples of a larger “culinary literacy.” Culinary literacy includes the ability to read published cookbooks and competently write out recipes, but it also entails engagement with information networks, friends and family sharing recipes amongst themselves, as well as the ability to modify recipes based on experience, knowledge of how to find appropriate ingredients, and practical skills.

For example, in addition to Beeton’s “Claret Cup,” Mrs. Foord’s recipe collection had attributions to at least forty-nine different people, including a recipe for “Curry” attributed to Abraham Cook, one for “Mango Pickle” she received from Mrs. Norfor while Foord was living in Cuddalore, and a recipe for “Little Cakes” from a butler working for a family named Caldwell. Michel’s book, which instigated Wall’s initial inquiry into literacy, also includes attributions, such as “To Make Plum Cakes My Lady Nowell’s Way,” “My Lady Lucas’s Receipt to Pickle Wallnuts,” and “Sugar Cakes Mrs. Carter’s Way.” The networks accessed by Foord and Michel, evidenced by these examples, crossed international boundaries within the British empire, as well as class boundaries. Michel’s distinction between Lady Nowell and Mrs. Carter indicates that she was sharing recipes with women in the nobility as well as the middling classes.

Fig. 1. Page from Elizabeth Michel’s recipe book. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Beyond published cookbooks and acquaintances, culinary literacy includes engagement with other sources. Foord included clippings from newspapers in her recipe collection, such as three recipes for marmalades and five “tea-time” recipes for using marrow (a squash similar to a zucchini), and recipes cut from an advertising pamphlet created by a commercial flour company, Paisley.

Fig. 2. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

Beyond just incorporating the recipes into their collections, our compilers also often made changes to them. Michel felt it necessary to include the caveat “my own way” on a recipe for cakes, implying that while this particular recipe was something she had invented, any other unattributed recipes in her collection were likely copied from books; by writing “my own way” she claimed authorship and exhibited pride in that fact. On a clipping for “A Breakfast Preserve,” an M. J. Foord added notes modifying the recipe to utilize the natural pectin in the orange seeds but avoid leaving them in the finished product. This example of “kitchen literacy” is key in understanding how these personal recipe collections are products of a larger culinary literacy that encompassed engagement with published texts, exchange of information within social networks, and a body of knowledge gained through experience. Incidentally, Elizabeth Michel’s entry at the Wellcome Library still describes the recipe book as being written in an “illiterate hand,” which showcases the need for resources to re-evaluate catalog descriptions across all archives and adjust them to reflect this idea of culinary literacy.

Fig. 3. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

[1] Wendy Wall, “Literacy and the Domestic Arts,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 73:3 (September 2010), 384. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.383.pdf

 


Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a recent PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in British Atlantic foodways of the eighteenth century. From roast beef to turtle soup, she researches the intersection of eating and identity during the Age of Revolutions and imperial turmoil. Using microhistories of figures like sailors, military generals, merchants, and housewives, she explores the impact of foodways on discussions of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusions. Elizabeth also enjoys cooking historical manuscript recipes, translating eighteenth and nineteenth century instructions, measurements, and tools into their modern equivalent to learn what she can about culinary knowledge and labor.

Recipe for an Unfinished Book: Helen Witty’s America Preserved

By Melina Moe

From the Helen Witty Papers, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Yield: One comprehensive book on sweet preserving, “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first).”   

Prep time: At least twelve years (1974–1986), possibly longer.

Status: Unsealed.

Ingredients

  • 1 typed proposal to Sally Kovalchick at Workman Publishing, dated September 30, 1986
  • 1 working list of raw ingredients, “far from complete,” with more than 200 entries
  • 1 food safety testing sheet, annotated in red and black ink
  • Clippings, in quantity, from newspapers and magazines
  • Recipes borrowed, adapted, and attributed from sources spanning centuries
  • Handwritten marginalia, to taste

Method

Among the working papers of food writer Helen Witty (1921–2023), now held at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, sits a project that never became a book. Witty was a two-time James Beard Award winner, editor at Cuisine and Food & Wine, and author of Better Than Store-Bought (1979) and Fancy Pantry (1986). Her archive documents a career that ranged from editor and recipe developer to authority on American home cooking at a time when the food-writing world was still a small and largely male professional scene.[i] She called one of those unfinished projects America Preserved, and in a 1986 proposal to her publisher described it as “the book on sweet preserving in America.”[ii]

Fig. 1. The food safety testing sheet or the AMERPRE planning page. Image courtesy of author.

It was, in other words, an ambitious book. But perhaps one appropriately scaled to its subject, since preserving is as broad and deep a cooking technique as one could imagine. Evidence of deliberate food drying in the Middle East stretches back to roughly 12,000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks packed quince in honey; the Romans cooked the two together to produce the ancestor of marmalade.[iii] For most of human history, salting, smoking, fermenting, and sugaring were not cooking techniques so much as serious strategies for addressing the challenge of food logistics– that is, how not to starve between harvests, through long voyages, or on military campaigns. In much of the world, preserving remains an economic necessity. But in the U.S., and likely for Witty’s audience, preserving had undergone a gradual shift toward the enthusiastic hobbyist or serious foodie looking to capture the flavor notes of a season for the less verdant times of year. As the National Center for Home Food Preservation puts it, we have moved “from ‘preserve because we have to’ to ‘preserve because we like to.’”   

Fig. 2. “New Mexico. Mrs. Fidel Romero Proudly Exhibits Her Canned Food” (1946), NARA via Wikimedia Commons.

Preserving has attracted an idiosyncratic cast of historical devotees. Nostradamus, before he was a prophet, was an apothecary who published his Treatise on Cosmetics and Jams in 1555. It was a bestseller featuring cherry jelly “fit to set before a King,” alongside love potions and plague remedies. In the summer of 1898, Marie Curie put up fourteen pots of gooseberry jelly and discovered polonium.[iv]

Witty’s America Preserved intended to carry on this lineage of serious, obsessive preservers. In the archive, we can find her proposed table of contents, which runs several pages: jams, jellies, conserves, fruit butters, marmalades, syrups, fruit pastes, curds, nectars, leathers, spoon sweets, fruits preserved in alcohol, and candied peels. A hand-written annotation suggests she was considering whether sweet-pickled fruits counted as preserves or relishes. Her working list of raw ingredients ran to more than 200 entries. She wanted to cover not just recipes but the science of pectin, the question of sugar substitutes, the uses of a pressure cooker, and the history behind it all: “lore, history, old art, old recipes,” updated for modern cooks in what she called “post-nostalgia” versions.

Fig. 3. “Canning by the cold pack method.” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Like all archives worth their shelf space, though, what her papers illustrate most vividly is how Witty worked. The neatly-labeled folders (“S” for “spoon sweets”) are stuffed with clippings from newspapers and magazines, recipes gathered from other cooks, notes from conversations with food scientists at Cornell and extension agents on Long Island. A food safety testing sheet lists recipes she sent to the Suffolk County Cooperative Extension test kitchen and is annotated “okay” in red ink or flagged for further checking. Those recipes she sent for the students to verify include baked cranberry preserves with orange and cardamom, Bing cherries in a sweet nine-day pickle, Escoffier’s condiment of sweet peppers. Witty’s “personal” recipe collection was archival. She was a collector who tested, tasted, selected, innovated, annotated, and eventually shared her recipes in cookbooks. This is appropriate for a book that winkingly aspired to be “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first),” since the long history has always contained such borrowing and inheritance, with recipes across fences and through generations, each cook adjusting the sugar, swapping the spice, making it theirs. Witty’s book didn’t come to fruition, though it is preserved in her archive, which, like a garden in September, shows she may have had too many good things on her hands at once.

 

[i] Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. The guide to the boxes was compiled by Anne E. Witty, September 2022.

[ii] Helen Witty to Sally Kovalchick, September 30, 1986, Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Box 7.

[iii] For a lively overview, see Sue Shephard, Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

[iv] Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). See also Rebecca Rupp, “Jam: Chemistry and Cool in a Jar,” National Geographic, 2021.


Melina Moe is the Curator of Literature at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where the Helen S. Witty papers are held.

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