Category Archives: Summer 2024

Community Cookbooks as Mapping Resources

By Suzanne Zoe Joskow 
When I began building The Community Cookbook Archive — made up of over four hundred Los Angeles-based collective recipe books, spanning three centuries — I was struck by the books’ role in Southern California place-making. The majority of community cookbooks are self-published, which means the included recipes are not from professional chefs. Instead, the entries reflect how contributors, usually women, cooked and ate at home. Indeed, notions of “home” are foundational to these books – from recipes evoking the flavors of a childhood far away to those anchored in native ingredients. Community cookbooks are absolutely records of place.

In the most literal sense, it is not uncommon for community cookbooks to include actual maps. The Westchester Directory and Culinary Art community cookbook, published 1950, opens with a map of the area, followed by hand-written recipes from residents within LA’s Westchester neighborhood. Visible towards the top of the map (image below) one can see the land that was, at that time, Howard Hughes’ personal airfield, now Playa Vista. 

Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.
Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.

Beyond maps, many community cookbooks, especially older ones, contain both the names of the recipe contributors and also their home addresses. In some instances, it may be the only time this directory information ever appeared in print — even in phone books, which often listed only a household’s men, or in census data, due to systemic undercounting of certain demographics.

One example of an early Los Angeles cookbook that features contributor addresses is The Federation Cook Book. The book was compiled and published in 1911 by Bertha L. Turner, on behalf of the California State Federation of Colored Women. Turner was a sought-after Pasadena caterer and philanthropist, who also served as a State Superintendent of Domestic Science. In the 1930s, she ran the Tea Room at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.
Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.

The Federation Cook Book is filled with recipes contributed by and, importantly, for Black women from throughout California. In her book, The Jemima Code, journalist Toni Tipton-Martin writes that the Federation Cookbook was one of the first books “that preserved the culinary values inherited and practiced by the black middle class.”

The cookbook also documents a uniquely Southern California history. While many of the included recipes come from across California, a significant number were contributed by women in Bertha L. Turner’s own Pasadena neighborhood. 

Because contributor addresses are included, I was able to plot many recipes from the book onto a present day map: 

Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.
Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.

Pasadena, especially South Pasadena, was infamous for its racist housing policies and covenants, so it is not surprising to find that the Black, mostly middle-class contributors to this book were clustered in Northwest Pasadena’s thriving Black community — where many early residents had come to LA in the late 1800s from the Jim Crow South. 

But one might immediately notice something else about the map: today the 210 freeway, which began construction in the 1950s, cuts right through these residences. In fact, I had to enlist an early 1900s map of Pasadena to make an address overlay on this present day one, because so many street names were changed, or eliminated. The majority of the Pasadena home addresses in The Federation Cook Book no longer exist. And yet, their kitchens are conjured by cooking from the book Turner compiled. 

As I leafed through other cookbooks in the Archive, I was intrigued to find Turner’s name in two additional books as well. One is an advertisement for Turner’s catering business in The Superior Cookbook (1927), put out by the Lamanda Park Woman’s Club. The other is the 1935 cookbook from the Pasadena Shakespeare Club, where Turner was a caterer. 

Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.
Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.

Seeing Ms. Turner’s name appear in books from both her primarily-Black neighborhood and her, often white, professional context, adds additional insight into the multitude of food worlds she moved between. In the 1927 Superior Cookbook, Turner’s advertisement included a new address, different from where the Federation Cookbook listed her in 1911. The Turners’ new purchase, at 725 Winona Avenue, was significant enough to gain coverage in the California Eagle, which described it as a “palatial residence”. 

I’ve added an approximation of this new address to the previous neighborhood map:

725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.
725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.

Unfortunately, Ms. Turner’s grand residence appears to have been demolished for freeway construction as well, and the address no longer exists. But it is remembered in the cookbooks she contributed to and supported.

Community cookbooks can be a meaningful mapping resource for scholars. However, they have rarely been treated as such and several books in the Community Cookbook Archive do not exist in library or institutional holdings. As with any primary source document, they are flawed and complex reflections of those who made them. But beyond recipes, the books capture granular, neighborhood histories, amidst ever changing city maps. As someone who studies place through the lens of food, I find these books to be an incredible gift. 

Suzanne Zoe Joskow has a BA in American Studies from Yale University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. In her artwork and curatorial practice, Joskow focuses on the connection between physical material and social history — often in the form of maps or archives. Most recently, she is immersed in Los Angeles food history, exploring the ways Angelinos, particularly women, cooked at home. She has spoken about her work with a wide array of public audiences and media, including with The Los Angeles Times, NPR, KCRW’s Good Food, USC’s Archives Bazaar, and The Getty Museum’s ReCurrent Podcast. Joskow created and runs The Community Cookbook Archive, a growing, physical and digital collection of over 400 Los Angeles-based community cookbooks.

The Imagined, Implied, and Authentic Audiences of an American Settlement House Cookbook

By Kimberly S. Baker, PhD
In early 20th-century Milwaukee, a Midwestern American industrial city, social reformer Lizzie Kander and her fellow aid workers published a community cookbook (of sorts). Kander and colleagues ran “The Settlement,” a settlement house that supported and acclimated immigrant Jewish families to urban American living, offering social services, arts and culture opportunities, and classes including English and civics (Fritz). The Settlement Cookbook began as the instructional text for its cooking class for young women and girls. The settlement house movement generally held that adopting American ways of living included adopting American culinary habits (Ziegelman, 160); thus, settlement-style cooking classes introduced immigrants to mainstream American food.

The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This cookbook and its historical and cultural context, audiences, and communicative goals introduce a “community” where imagined, implied, and authentic audiences converge. 

Settlement house initiatives can be understood as contact zones, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” (Pratt, 1991). In these contact zones, people with social power and economic means strive to influence the lives of less-privileged people, and lower-status settlement house patrons receive services provided by higher-status workers, who themselves benefit, emotionally, culturally, and socially, from giving aid.

The uneven relationships present in settlement houses relies on forms of authoritative power which are also fundamental to advice literature, including household manuals, where higher-status authors instruct and make recommendations to their supposedly lower-status readers (Dorfman, 4). If authors write to advise an implied audience of their own peers, intending that authentic (lower-status) readers were “listening in” for guidance necessary to rise socially, group boundaries become more visible. Such advice is believed to be valuable because “correct” behavior indicates who belongs.

These were dynamics which Kander herself understood very well. Settlement “stood for domestic science;” she argued in The Settlement’s 1899 president’s report, and cooking class trained girls to “do battle with the industrialized world,” and, “equip [them] to become economical and efficient homemakers and intelligent Mothers.”(Annual Report, 1899). Precision and formality reflect the institutional authority of classroom texts and the then-emerging home-economics discipline with its scientific jargon. Cookbook instructions outline techniques, as well as specify cooking tools, brand-name ingredients, and prepared foods.

Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

However, the Settlement’s authentic students were likely more experienced cooks than the start-with-the-basics instructions suggest. While Kander and her circle belonged to Reformed Jewish synagogues, the Settlement’s immigrant patrons followed more conservative religious practice, and kept Kosher (Fritz). The students’ kitchen skills were homegrown, as young Jewish girls learned religious food guidelines and traditional food preparation through helping their mothers (Ziegelman, 95-7). This oral tradition familiar to the immigrant students contrasts with the settlement house’s formal, institutional approach. Kander’s president’s report acknowledges these divergent norms, explaining that the cooking class was “obliged to conduct the lessons on the ‘Kosher’ plan—as the children adhered strictly to the orthodox rules of cooking,” (1899).

Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

That cultural accommodation soon faded; Kander’s notes (1898) for the initial classroom cookbook address Kosher practices, including defining Kosher cooking, dishes for milk and meat meals, meat preparation, and washing (with soda, not soap, which contained “mixed materials”). In the 1903 printed edition, nods to Kosher practices are minimal; non-compliant recipes such as for shellfish, and meat with dairy, feature among its pages. This cookbook content aligned with the non-Kosher eating habits of the local, middle-class, German, Reformed-Jewish community, rather than the settlement house students.

Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

In reflecting the broader local community, the cookbook not only gains potential readers, but also legitimacy by association with them. Community authority (and approval) offers students a permission structure to discard strict, traditional norms and adopt American cuisine.

That affluent, German-Jewish community was also a key cookbook audience, supporting The Settlement and funding the cookbook itself: Kander initially sought to publish the recipes for classroom efficiency, so students could spend class time cooking, not copying. The Settlement’s all-male directors denied this funding request as extravagant, so the women and their publisher instead sold advertisements in the cookbook, many to businesses owned by Kander’s social peers. Students bought copies for a reduced fee; a local department store sold surplus cookbooks to the public. The initial 1901 print run sold out within the year, and proceeds from subsequent editions, edited by Kander herself, funded The Settlement through its first nine years (Fritz). 

The cookbook’s advertising sections showcased luxury goods and services that reinforced the sophisticated, middle-class living invoked by the recipes. While the lifestyle advertised was likely unattainable for the immigrant student audience, the women whose families owned the businesses that purchased ads were more realistic customers. The ads may also have reinforced the ad buyers’ altruism by publicizing who else bought ads and supported the cause.

The cookbook may appear a rhetorical flop, delivering strict, novice-level instruction to knowledgeable students, proscribing a cuisine that challenges students’ religious norms, and advertising an unattainable lifestyle. Instructors with social status and wealth advised newcomers that being American meant following these guidelines. Yet, despite apparent shortcomings of audience analysis, the cookbook remained popular, locally, and nationally, for decades, blending tradition with American tastes and the changing times.

REFERENCES:

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues 12.1 (1992): 21-38.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (2004): 36-49. 

Kander, Mrs. Simon. and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook.  Milwaukee: The Settlement. 1903. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. 2010.

— Annual Report: Milwaukee Jewish Mission. June 6, 1899. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 2 Folder 11) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

—-Notebook. “Cooking Lesson Book.” 1898. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 1 Folder 10) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Ziegelman, J. 97 Orchard: An edible history of five immigrant families in one New York tenement. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. 2010.


Dr. Kimberly Baker is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, in Milwaukee, WI, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication. Her research interests include The Settlement Cookbook, and its author, social reformer Lizzie Black Kander, as well as workplace communication and the experience of user-experience (UX) professionals in organizations. She is at work on a co-authored book about everyday rhetoric for undergraduate STEM students.

Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach

We prepared this traditional lunch when my cousin visited our place as a part of her wedding rituals. This meal includes rice, shukto (mixed vegetables), dal, prawn malai curry, fried potato and nuts, begun bahar (masala eggplant), mutton curry, pomfret with poppy seeds, and shorshe ilish (hilsa mustard gravy). It took more than sixteen hours to cook all of the dishes mentioned here. Photo courtesy of the author.

By Agnibha Maity
In Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth century made way for women writers to archive and standardise recipes. It was at this time when Calcutta, now Kolkata, became the epicentre of food experiments and restaurant culture in India. Restaurants and taverns were run mainly by chefs trained to satisfy European taste buds. They revolutionised the traditional methods and changed the character of dishes with the ingredients borrowed from the West. For example, potatoes – found in every other Bengali dish, even in the famous Calcutta-style Biriyani – appeared on the Bengali platter only by the nineteenth century. The story for cauliflower – many winter cuisines are incomplete without it – is almost similar; colonisers introduced the cultivation of many such vegetables in Bengal. Before the advent of the Britishers, Medieval Bengal depended on rice, curd, fish, local leafy greens, preparations of pulses, and a handful of vegetables such as banana flowers and eggplants. Although Bengalis did not let go of any of the medieval dishes, a lunch or dinner menu from a contemporary household will show more familiarity with the preparation styles invented or modified in colonial times. It was Bengali middle-class women who were responsible for the standardisation of modern cooking practices with their meticulous everyday experimentations, and this evolution of recipes can be traced in many cookbooks written by women authors since the publication of Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish O Niramish Ahar in 1902.

Leela Majumdar’s cookbook, Rannar Boi (1979), co-authored by her daughter Kamala Chattopadhyay, follows the long tradition of archiving recipes but with exceptional care for women’s labour and nutrition in general. She was a gifted author of her time and belonged to one of the most renowned families of Kolkata. However, this cookbook does not belong to her oeuvre as a literary figure in Bengal but serves as a practical handbook for homemakers. She intended this to be a handy companion for everyday cooking. Traditional cooking methods used to be laborious because most of the dishes needed manual grinding of masalas and multi-step heating, and the hot climate forced women to prepare meals twice a day. A typical dish, such as kochu shaker ghonto (taro leaf mishmash), as found in Amish O Niramish Ahar and even in the recent The Calcutta Cookbook, requires the mixing of various spices, grating coconuts, adding pastes of cumin, chilli, and ginger. Cutting the stalks is also a professional task – the outer layer must be removed and washed with salt, or else calcium oxalate crystals might irritate throats. What is interesting about Leela Majumdar’s cookbook is that she avoids any nostalgic remembrance of tedious cooking rituals which exploited women’s labour. In the preface, she declares, “Don’t forget the dishes, but the recipes must be slightly altered… We intend that cooking no meal should take more than two hours.” She focuses on cleanliness, adopting modern kitchenware, and improving hygiene. She contrasts starkly with Europeans or Americans who prefer preparing one main dish per meal to save time for other work, such as a chicken roast accompanied by baked potato or salads. Her recipe notebook is plain and straightforward; there are no East-West divisions. It begins with varieties of soups, which Bengali elite society first tasted during the bloom of restaurant culture in the mid-nineteenth century.  From Scotch broth, tomato soup, and minestrone, she jumps to Bengali Khichdi, sour and bitter lentils, with ease. Her cookbook blurs the distinction other contemporary books celebrate, and her addition of practical notes entitled “The intricacies of homemaking,” along with simplified recipes in lucid Bengali, make the book friendly for readers of all backgrounds and education levels. 

Agnibha Maity is a PhD candidate and a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. He obtained his M.A. and B.A. from the University of Calcutta. His PhD topic focuses on gendered identity in archival discourses. His research interests include subaltern studies, archival studies, and South Asian gender history. He loves discovering lost recipes from rural Bengal and archiving them when possible.

Teaching with Community Cookbooks

By Jolie Braun
Increasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language,[1] women’s lives,[2] and African American history.[3] In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks. This method of studying the book as a physical object and cultural artifact can open up new avenues of discovery for students and spur different ways of thinking about authorship, publishing, and audience. In this context, community cookbooks are equal parts challenging and accessible, complex objects that offer students much to consider and discuss.

In Fall 2022, I taught a one-credit first year seminar, “More than Just Recipes: Exploring American Cookbooks,” based in the cookbook collection I steward as curator of modern literature and manuscripts at the Ohio State University Library’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library (RBML). I organized the course chronologically, beginning with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), known as America’s first cookbook, and ending with a recent collection of no-recipe recipes, Danny Licht’s Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again (2021). Each class period focused on a different topic, such as cookbooks and global foodways or advertising cookbooks. The first part of a session was a combination of lecture and discussion. During the latter half, students worked directly with materials from RBML’s holdings.

Community cookbooks work well for hands-on analysis. Produced by small, amateur groups outside of traditional publishing channels, these books deviate from their mainstream counterparts in significant ways. This is evident inside and out: for example, they are often bound with inexpensive, comb binding, lack images of finished dishes, and frequently include duplicate recipes. The creators, resources, and motives involved in producing community cookbooks are vastly different from mainstream cookbooks and the tangible evidence of these differences can lead to a fruitful discussion about expectations and conventions of the genre. 

For our class session on community cookbooks, I selected several published in Ohio between the 1960s and the 1990s, including a mix of cookbooks printed by cookbook publishers—an option that became increasingly popular during the late twentieth century—as well as books that had been produced largely by the groups themselves.

A few Ohio community cookbooks used in this class session. Image credit: Jolie Braun

Working in pairs, students chose a book from the selection and used a handout I created with questions to guide their study. They began by recording bibliographic information about their book, a task that prompted them to locate these details and consider the context they provided. With community cookbooks, this seemingly simple task can present challenges: Who is the author? When and where was it published? During our class discussion, we talked about why such details may not have been considered necessary to include in self-published works created by a collective and intended for a local audience.

Students also wrote a physical description of their cookbook. How was it made, what materials were used, and what could that reveal? Some were bound together with metal rings or had covers made out of scrap cardstock, familiar materials used in unconventional ways that suggested both the limitations and resourcefulness of their creators. These descriptions were an opportunity to encourage students to think about how a book represents a series of choices and what decisions they might make if creating a book of their own.  

Lastly, students reviewed the contents of their book, chose an unfamiliar recipe to research, and reported their findings to the class. Their selections—such as applesauce meatloaf and sock it to me cake—were representative of home cooking, and led to a conversation about the nature of foods found in community cookbooks and what they could tell us about how people ate and the group that compiled the cookbook.

Community cookbooks can be eye-opening for students. My class was surprised and excited to encounter cookbooks that were not the work of chefs or cooks or writers, but of ordinary people.


[1] Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite, “Books That Cook: Teaching Food and Food Literature in the English Classroom,” College English, 70.4 (2008): 421-436.

[2] Kathryn G. Matheny, “No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21.2 (2020): 79-97. https://rbm.acrl.org/index.php/rbm/article/view/24707/32534

[3] Sakina M. Hughes, “Teaching African American History and Culture through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, 42.2 (2017): 59-72.

Jolie Braun is the Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she manages and develops the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include teaching and outreach in special collections, self-publishing, cookbooks, and zines. Her co-curated exhibit, Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History, runs from August 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025 in the Thompson Library gallery.