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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).

Posts, Summer 2025, Teaching Resources

Recipes as Pedagogical Resistance: Teaching Food Writing in an AI-Era

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By Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers 

As college professors with three combined decades of First-Year Writing experience, we’re observing two unsettling trends: first, that traditional undergraduate students are increasingly unlikely to tackle academic writing without relying on AI-tools, and second, that they are increasingly likely to hold rigid beliefs about writing—what it is, what it can do, and what it should sound and look like. As a result, we’re noting a third phenomenon: in the face of machine-generated content, students don’t trust their own voices.  

And why should they? As products of an educational system that standardizes and quantifies learning, it makes sense that many students view writing as an output—one to be assessed through binary lenses of good/bad, right/wrong.  

Enter generative-AI, which capitalizes on learned beliefs that “good” academic writing conforms to a prescribed formula and that the goal of writing is not to learn, but to efficiently produce the “right” answer in service of a grade. But writing is much like cooking; the process is vital to the product. Both writing and cooking are iterative and messy; words, like ingredients, often refuse to come together. They demand patience, humility, and the willingness to make mistakes. And, as any experienced cook knows, the courage to deviate from the recipe’s formula, and to defy its discursive authority in favor of our own instincts.  

But let us not forget, the recipe is a technology, and one not unlike gen-AI. Derived from the Latin imperative “recipere,” meaning “to take or receive,” the word “recipe” dates back at least to the fourteenth century and was used by alchemists and domestic cooks to denote not a finished text but a “method of preparation,” or steps that, if followed, promised reliable outcomes (Notaker 144, 146-7). However, despite its steady move towards discursive efficiency and culinary standardization in the hands of nineteenth-century British writers Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton, recipes, unlike gen-AI, have always recorded the personal, the human, and even the body itself. As Kyla Tompkins puts it, beneath a recipe lies “a field of embodied knowledges, movements, flavors, smells, gestures, and habits that is only hinted at by [the recipe’s] own textual remains” (442). From kitchens in early modern British households to college classrooms, recipes, as technology, have the power to do what gen-AI cannot: “register the creative, intellectual, and social exchanges . . . of people trying to make sense of their worlds” (Wendy Wall xii). 

And so, to our students’ surprise, we tasked them with writing a mini-cookbook for their first college writing assignment. As we explain in the prompt, “Like cookbooks themselves, ‘we contain multitudes’ (Ferguson 33). We are human beings; our identities are many, and our food traditions and tastes are shaped by these identities.” To complete the project, students sourced three recipes reflective of different intersections of their identities. Collected recipes became personal narrative once surrounded by carefully-curated paratexts: treasured family photos, marginal notes, recipe annotations, personal anecdotes. (For Jolie Braun’s experience teaching with community cookbooks, see her post here.)

Recipe Entry, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queen’s University of Charlotte student (image included with permission.)

To prepare, we studied the historical evolution of the cookbook. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859) taught us that standardizing the recipe form played a key role in the historical construction of white, middle-class femininity. Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee (2019), on the other hand, uses the recipe as record, reclaiming African foodways erased by the slave trade.  

Inspired by these examples and others such as Vertamae Smart-Grosvener’s Vibration Cooking (1970), students did so much more than collect recipes; they wrote to understand themselves. Their collections centered beloved family traditions such as tailgating, commemorated lost loved ones, confronted traumatic memories of disordered eating, and recorded holiday traditions that bridged linguistic and geographic homeplaces. 

Cover, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queens University of Charlotte (image included with permission).

Writing about food invited students to discover and negotiate the complicated, sometimes painful, and sometimes joyful intersections between food, one’s past, and who one wishes to become; to legitimize and honor memories, emotions, cultural heritages, languages of origin, and embodied knowledges at risk of being lost.  

This is writing gen-AI cannot manufacture. Indeed, as one student put it: 

My favorite part of this assignment was being able to express myself in a way I had never experienced. Linking food to myself, and the various aspects of my identity or memories opened my mind to different ways people can express themselves. The only genuine struggle I had within this was overcoming the heavy emotions that I was trying to convey. At first, I experienced an emotional block, in which all my emotions related to the assignment seemed non-existent. This obviously limited the vulnerable aspect of my cookbook I have grown much pride in. The project has truly been a joy to complete, and I would gladly do it again. 

AI- writing erases linguistic differences and generates composite knowledge in service of expedience and transaction. Cookbook-writing, in contrast, opens space for abundance by resisting dominant literacies. In joining this tradition, students learned to recognize writing as a vital act—of remembering, of re-claiming, of resistance. 

Bonnie Shishko is Assistant Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and First-Year Writing. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and food in Victorian and contemporary women’s writing. Her work on recipes and their history has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Victorians Institute Journal, the edited collections Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays (Edinburgh University Press) and Teaching Food in Literature (MLA Press), as well as Journal of Victorian Culture Online and The Recipes Project. She enjoys all things pickled and discovering new ways to make the tastiest tomato sandwich.   

Shawn Bowers is Associate Professor at Queens University of Charlotte where she teaches courses on creative writing, Latinx literature, and First-Year Writing and currently serves as the director of General Education for the university. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens. Under the pen name Anita Cantillo, Shawn has published poetry in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Juke Joint, Blue Mesa Review, and Azahares, among other journals. Her favorite food is tamales from her beloved homeland of Costa Rica.  

Works Cited

Beeton, Isabella. Book of Household Management. London: S.O. Beeton, 1861. 

Kelly, Rhea. “Survey: 86% of Students Already Use AI in Their Studies.” Campus Technology. 28, (2024): https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/28/survey-86-of-students-already-use-ai-in-their-studies.aspx.  

Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: from Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geeche Girl. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970.  

Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2019. 

Tompkins, Kyla. “Consider the Recipe.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 1,2 (2013): 439-445. 

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.  

American Studies, Education, Modern, Posts, Summer 2024, Teaching Resources

Teaching with Community Cookbooks

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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.

Early Modern, Family and Household, Posts, Students, Teaching Resources, Winter 2024

Olfactory Notes: Integrating Embodied Research in Art History

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By Madison Clyburn

In early modern Italy, perfumes were powerful substances whose therapeutic properties could generate pleasure and preserve or remedy one’s health if worn on or consumed by the body. In this post, I feature a typical Italian perfume recipe, “To make perfume for clothes,” from the Italian engraver and author Eustachio Celebrino’s (c. 1490-after 1535) printed vernacular pamphlet, Opera nova piacevole laqvale insegna di far varie compositioni odorifere per far bella ciaschuna donna…intitulata Venusta (Venice, 1550) intended for female consumers. Celebrino’s formulaic recipe books, typical of the genre, are printed records of socially important topics, like women’s health and adornment.

I made this recipe in Dr. Chriscinda Henry’s graduate seminar, Materiality and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Art, at McGill University in the Winter of 2023. Celebrino’s recipe allowed us to work through experimental research methodologies in our final week dedicated to Embodied Knowing and Experimental Methods, which I co-led with fellow seminar member Mahdis Mohajeri. Making this perfume recipe raised questions about what it means for art historians living in one sensorium and studying others, like early modern Italy, where smelling amber rosary beads during prayer might bring one closer to God, chewing myrrh pastilles could prevent plague or wearing musk might help conceive a healthy child.

“To Make Perfume for Clothes”

The first step toward integrating embodied research in our art history seminar was to choose a recipe with accessible ingredients that was relatively quick to make. Celebrino’s perfumed sachet was just right since it simply asks one to take “fresh rose leaves & dry them in the shade & then take two carats [or vials] of musk, and make it into a powder, & two coins of fine cloves, and mix together, & then put it [all] in one or two little bags in the clothes.” 

Graduate student, Em Grisdale’s sachet keeps sweaters moth-free and smelling fresh one year later!

Before our seminar, I assembled a recipe kit with instructions and ingredients for each participant. I found cloves and dried roses from a local herbalist shop, while I substituted musk root for musk, whose extraction from the musk deer’s preputial gland is primarily illegal today. 

Next, I transcribed and translated the recipe, placing that information in a PowerPoint. This left more time in class to examine primary texts like Pliny’s The Natural History and Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Commentaries (1565) to understand the varied classical and early modern uses of musk, roses, and cloves. At the same time, selections from Sven Dupré et al. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (2020) and Pamela Smith’s From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022) grounded our entrance into an aromatic art history, offering insight into how hands-on historical recipe experiments can help make students more resourceful researchers and inform early modern health, hygiene, and beauty practices.

The final step consisted of interpreting the recipe through practice. Students opened their kits and began to crush, mix, and add the ingredients to a draw-string bag.

Some participants followed the recipe, and others adapted it; some used their hands, while others used a hammer or mortar and pestle to crush the musk root.

The recipe’s flexible ending tells one to put the sachet “in the clothes,” possibly in a chest, carried in a pocket, worn under a skirt or attached to a belt. Making the recipe together allowed us to pose questions, such as what types and materials of bags might be preferred, how much musk equals a carat or vial, and share reactions like musk stinks! 

Em Grisdale shows us how to wear Celebrino’s recipe on a belt loop.

Implications for Sensory Research in Art History

Embodied research welcomes questions about the sensuous relationships between the ephemeral body and its material culture. Things like perfumed sachets for clothes hinted at but not seen in visual media reveal how olfactory experiences in the early modern period are everywhere and nowhere. For example, middle- and upper-class women often had the luxury of owning multiple sets of clothes. When not worn, women stored their clothes in chests with sachets made from pure ingredients like musk or, for aspiring citizens, a counterfeit version made of spices and toasted breadcrumbs to preserve the fabrics’ quality and cleanliness. One can imagine only the finest ingredients perfuming Lambert Sustris’ Reclining Venus (c. 1548) in this wholesome atmosphere comprised of a downy mattress sprinkled with fragrant pink and white roses, sumptuous fabrics, and a woman playing a folding harpsichord, whose charming sounds vibrate through the clean air wafting through an open colonnade window.

Attributed to Lambert Sustris (c. 1515-20 -1584), Reclining Venus, c. 1548, oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm, Venice or Padua, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3479. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

But of course, we cannot see the physical sachet made from Celebrino’s recipe that may lie nestled inside the elegant cassone (chest) in the background of Sustris’ painting. We cannot sniff notes of rose, musk, and clove possibly escaping the fibres of the pastel pink dress that a woman holds above the chest. Only by reconstructing these sachets can we begin to sense smell’s critical role in preserving hygienic bodies and homes as well as in observing or challenging socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in early modern Italy.

Detail of Sustris’ Reclining Venus showing a young woman leaning over an open-lidded cassone. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Embracing what we cannot see or smell through embodied research allows us to imagine how Celebrino’s recipe and Sustris’ painting document once fragrant interiors. An art historical approach to making recipes aims to recenter early modern sensuous practices and experiences in artworks so that teaching and academic scholarship can help us bridge two sensoria—that of our current moment and overlooked pasts.

Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD candidate at McGill University. Her thesis focuses on the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research combines art and gender history, the history of medicine, material culture, and sensory studies to determine how perfumes were used to observe, challenge, and invert socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in the early modern period.