Category Archives: Teaching Resources

Teaching Schoolchildren with Historic Recipes

By Amanda Moniz 

Last February, I visited the Washington Middle School for Girls, a Catholic school serving girls from underprivileged backgrounds in Washington, D.C., to make cookies from the first African American cookbook, published by Malinda Russell in 1866.  In this post, I’d like to reflect on what I learned about the challenges and possibilities of teaching history in schools through hands-on cooking programs.

First a little background about Malinda Russell.  Born in Tennessee around 1820, Russell lived most or all of her life as a freewoman.  At age 19, she intended to migrate to Liberia, but her plans were stymied.  She married and had a son, worked as a washerwoman, and, in time, learned to cook.  After her husband’s death, she kept a boarding house and then opened a pastry shop.  During the Civil War, she was attacked and robbed for supporting the Union and fled to Michigan.  In 1866, she published her cookbook to raise funds to return to Tennessee, where she hoped to recover her property.

Malinda Russell cookbook photo

The Washington Middle School invited me to explore the life of this determined woman and make one of her recipes with the school’s 35 fourth and fifth graders.  I chose Russell’s recipe for jumbles – a cookie made with rosewater, mace, and caraway seeds.  The school has no kitchen, so we agreed we would prep, but not bake, the cookie dough in the lunchroom.  So that the students could try the jumbles, I would bake the cookies at home and bring them in.

So on a bitterly cold day at the end of February, I found myself nervously unloading grocery bags at the school.  I had taught children before, but never 35 of them.  I wasn’t sure if I knew how to present either the history or the baking lesson in a school setting.

After I set up, the teachers ushered the kids in.  I started by asking the girls what they knew about slavery. They were able to speak knowledgably about slaves’ experiences.  Then I asked what they knew about the lives of free African Americans in the antebellum era, and the answer was just about nothing.  I explained that Malinda Russell was a free African American who had lived when most African Americans were slaves.  I outlined her story and talked about obstacles she would have faced.

It was time to make the jumbles.  I had students read the recipe aloud and identify ingredients.  Next I assigned tasks.  Then, we got to work and this is where things went somewhat awry.  While waiting for ingredients to be passed around, the kids jostled each other and got a little noisy.  I found it challenging to maintain order with the girls.  We got four batches of the dough made, however, and the kids rolled or shaped it into balls or double rings.  Finally, we sampled the jumbles – and they were a hit.

So what did I learn?  Most important, I recognized that teaching history through recipes to elementary and middle school students (and, surely, high school students too) critically depends on K-12 educators who know how to teach schoolchildren and can anticipate their needs and interests in ways that a visitor like myself could not.  I had thought through every step of the recipe and how to make it work even though we weren’t in a kitchen, but the lack of a kitchen turned out not to be a real issue.  Instead, the fact that some ingredients had to be passed from table to table created downtime for the girls to become antsy.  I wanted the kids to measure out ingredients themselves – this is what cooking is – but I should have put, for instance, some flour into a bowl on each table and let the girls measure from it, rather than have to wait for the 5 pound bag to come to them.  An experienced K-12 teacher would not have made that and similar mistakes.

K-12 teachers are paramount in educating our children about history, but academic historians and institutions such as the American Historical Association (AHA) have key roles in broadening our children’s educational experiences too.  Russell does not find a place in elementary, middle, or high school curricula – although she can be fit into the study of the Civil War – and here is where academics can make a contribution.  Scholarly interest in food history is going gangbusters.  Historians would do well, I think, to collaborate with elementary and secondary school educators to identify usable primary sources that can be related to curricula.  The AHA’s K-12 workshop at the upcoming annual meeting in New York, in January 2015, will do just that: The workshop will explore teaching the history of World War I through food.

What worked?  The students loved the opportunity to cook at school.  They were eager to answer my questions and to read aloud from the cookbook.  But the chance to take ingredients and transform them captivated them.  And it created openings to teach history.  The girls at the Washington Middle School, and likewise, the students at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York, who I spoke with by Skype last February, wanted to know more about foods in the past.  The ingredients – something they could relate to but perhaps had not thought about as having pasts – sparked their historical curiosity and imagination.

Did I do everything right?  No.  Can we use historic recipes to teach history?  Absolutely.

Pen, Ink, and Pedagogy

By Amanda E. Herbert

Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University.  Photo by the author.
Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.

I teach an undergraduate seminar on gender in early modern Britain, and throughout the semester, students learn about the ways that people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries worked to differentiate women from men.  We talk about early modern ideas on the human body: Galen’s four humors, the two-seed versus the one-seed model of conception, and “reversible” reproductive systems.  We also talk about the ways that early modern people mapped gender onto the workings of the human brain, ascribing mental acuity to men, and emotional intensity to women.  All of these lessons help to show students that gender is a social construct, and that it is historically variable.  But the exercise that truly brings these concepts home is one on education.  After providing an overview of the topics that were taught to early modern children, I divide the classroom:  half learn to write like girls, and half learn to write like boys.

I tell the students that they are going to learn about early modern education and material culture by writing with quill and ink.  The students think that they are being given identical materials for this “hands-on” exercise.  I distribute goose quills and powdered ink packets (both of which are available for sale via the Colonial Williamsburg website), and I pass out model alphabets from the seventeenth century, so that the students can form their letters in the style used by early modern people.  But what they don’t realize is that they have received separate models: one alphabet comes from a guidebook for young boys, and another alphabet comes from a guidebook for young girls.

With their alphabets in hand, the students are then set a task: they are asked to copy a recipe for early modern ink.  This receipt, which I transcribed from a commonplace book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is entitled “To make Inke Verie Good.”  It was created by Anne (Granville) Dewes in the seventeenth century:

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beere vinegre, a pound of galls bruised halfe a pound of coperis [protosulphates of copper, iron, and zinc], and 4 ounces of gum bruised; first mix your water and vinegre together, and putt itt into an earthen Jug, (then put in the galls) stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme as you use it straine itt. &c.

As the students mix their ink, shape their quills, and start copying their recipes in “early modern style” handwriting, we talk about the ingredients contained in the recipe, as well as their cost and accessibility to people of both high and low status.  We talk about the time and labor that must have been involved in the production of ink.  We discuss the ways that ink was used in the home, and the gallons of ink that must have been consumed by early modern print shops.  We consider who made ink (both women and men) and who used ink (both women and men).  Ink was a ubiquitous part of life for early modern Britons, as essential to communication as are our own smartphones and tablets today.

About fifteen minutes before class ends, I ask the students to compare their transcriptions, and they are always surprised at the differences: half the class has written in one style, and half in another.  That’s because in early modern Britain, girls were encouraged to learn “Italic hand,” a style of writing with clearly defined, beautifully sculpted, decorative letters.  But boys were taught “Secretary hand,” a flowing, connected style intended for those who, it was implied, wrote with urgency, volume, and haste.  Realizing the ramifications of this – that although women and men used the same tools and the same recipes to communicate, early modern men’s words were seen as authoritative, while early modern women’s were viewed as window-dressing – brings our lesson on gender and education to a powerful close.

*****
Interested in early modern ink, or early modern education and handwriting?  The Folger Shakespeare Library has some excellent resources:

[1] Anne (Granville) Dewes, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, ca. 1640-1750, V.a.430 f. 42, Folger Shakespeare Library.  You can access Dewes’ ink recipe via the Folger’s Digital Image Collection: http://luna.folger.edu

[2] Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts for the Folger, has written a great piece on education and early modern handwriting for the Folger’s Collation blog: http://collation.folger.edu/2013/05/learning-to-write-the-alphabet

Teaching Recipes: A September Series

By Amanda E. Herbert

Classrooms in 1897 at the Francis M. Drexel School.
Classrooms in 1897 at the Francis M. Drexel School. Courtesy of Wikipedia Images.

In January of 2014, I wrote a post called “Chocolate in the Classroom,” which described a special lesson that I’d designed for my undergraduate Tudor and Stuart Britain course: to learn about the aesthetic and cultural changes accompanying the “Consumer Revolution” of the seventeenth century, students taste-tested chocolate that had been made according to an early modern recipe.  Most of the students really disliked the flavor of the chocolate – which featured spices such as chili, cinnamon, and nutmeg – but the response to my post on The Recipes Project was enthusiastic, with teachers from around the world writing in to talk about the ways that they used recipes in their own classes, seminars, and tutorials.

Recipes are wonderful pedagogical tools.  Deceptively simple, they encourage students to dig beneath and around a seemingly straightforward list of ingredients and directions, provoking conversations about historic foodways, linguistics, conceptions of race, socioeconomics, praxis, and religious and cultural prohibitions.  They require students to become close readers and sensitive, careful thinkers.  And they enliven discussion, as students and teachers alike imagine how a food or medicine might smell, look, taste, or feel.

During the month of September, The Recipes Project will feature a special series of posts on teaching recipes.  Our contributors will demonstrate the many excellent ways that recipes can be used in a variety of classrooms – from university lectures to elementary school classrooms – and in a range of disciplines, including classical studies, composition, history, literature, and the histories of medicine and science.  A particular strength of the series will be the use of recipes in the digital humanities, as several of our contributors are teaching students about web-based transcription via manuscript recipe collections and household account books.  Look for posts by Rebecca Laroche, Jennifer Munroe, Amy Tigner, and Hillary Nunn on the many exciting ways that students are digitizing and analyzing recipes for the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC).  But the series will also feature the work of those who have taken a more “practical” approach to teaching recipes, as Amanda Moniz, Valerie Korinek, Laurence Totelin, and Tovah Bender talk about their efforts to recreate and remake historic foods, medicines, and supplies, and how modern students experience the sensory worlds of the past.

We hope that our readers will be both impressed by the work of this group of scholar-teachers, and inspired to incorporate recipes into their own syllabi and lesson plans.  Please let us know how you’re using recipes in the classroom!  To contribute to the discussion, just hit the “comments” button below.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Mapping Women’s Social and Cultural Influences: An Exercise in Historical GIS

By Rachel A. Snell

Winterthur Library, Doc 47, Mrs. E.A. Phelp's recipe book
Winterthur Library, Doc 47, Mrs. E.A. Phelp’s recipe book

Dear Lizzie, You are quite welcome to the recipe & I wish you success in making the cake. I will come & see your cousin as soon as possible. Yours in such haste, Anne[1]

The above note accompanied a recipe for Hallowell Cake tucked into a recipe book kept by Mrs. E.A. Phelps of Canandaigau, Ontario County, New York. Manuscript recipe books from the nineteenth century overflow with examples of women’s social networks including notes marking the exchange of recipes like the example above, but also references to printed cookbooks, newspapers, churches, and social contacts.

In Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks they Wrote, Janet Theopano argued, “women’s cookbooks can be maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit.”[2] Cookbooks record not only what women cooked, but also their reading material, purchases, spirituality, and social networks. Occasionally, manuscript cookbooks contain enough information that the researcher can use GIS techniques to literally map these connections.  An extraordinary example of a manuscript cookbook from the Winterthur Museum and Library recently presented just that opportunity.

The inscription in the Rappe Family recipe book attributes the book to Grandmother Rappe. Dates recorded with some recipes as well as newspapers listed as sources for recipes suggest Grandmother Rappe complied the cookbook between 1810 and 1840. It consists of recipes for food and medicine as well as hints for housekeeping and gardening. A variety of categories are represented including cakes, puddings, preserving food, keeping cheese, creating a vegetable chimney ornament, various dyes, several recipes of tomato ketchup, advice to make cows come home, and remedies for common injuries as well as diseases like cholera and dysentery.

In most respects, the Rappe Family recipe book is typical for the period. Uniquely, the volume has an unusually precise record of recipe sources. Whoever compiled the Rappe Family recipe book included a source for nearly two-thirds of the recipes contained in the book. These sources include printed cookbooks, newspapers, almanacs, and individuals. Furthermore, for many individuals their location is recorded with the recipe. This inclusion of locations allows the researcher to create a GIS map of recipe sources, thus allowing us to view spatially Grandmother Rappe’s network: the connections and influences that shaped her cookbook and, by extension, her everyday life. As I start exploring GIS as a tool to better understand women’s networks, what follows is a description of my process thus far and some research questions I’m currently investigating.

Printed materials constitute a major source for the work; about half the attributed recipes were copied from newspapers or almanacs (marked in blue on the map). The Rappe Family recipe book references newspapers and almanacs published throughout the Mid-Atlantic including New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. A handful of recipes originated from newspapers published in Indiana and Virginia. The state of Ohio, unsurprisingly, is the best represented with The Ohio Repository contributing sixty recipes largely devoted to remedies, preserving food, and household hints. Published in Canton, Ohio under varying names from 1815 to the present, the domination of the local paper is unsurprising. While the recipes from The Ohio Repository are sprinkled throughout the text, suggesting it was consulted on a regular basis, the recipes from other newspapers appear in clusters such as six recipes from The Hagerstown Almanac (published in Hagerstown, Maryland) recorded successively in the volume.  This clustering suggests these publications were not regularly available and perhaps shared amongst friends forcing the cookbook compiler to transcribe the desired recipes in one sitting.

Winterthur Library, Doc. 512, Rappe Family Recipe Book
Winterthur Library, Doc. 512, Rappe Family Recipe Book

Other printed sources include two cookbooks printed in Vermont and Massachusetts (marked in red on the map). The first, New England Cookery, is a pirated edition of Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery published in Montpelier, Vermont in 1808. The second is Lydia Maria Child’s classic work, The Frugal American Housewife first published in 1829. Like the non-local newspapers, the recipes copied from these two printed works appear in clusters. Again, it is likely the compiler borrowed these cookbooks from a friend or neighbor.

Winterthur Library, Doc. 512, Rappe Family Recipe Book
Winterthur Library, Doc. 512, Rappe Family Recipe Book

Finally, the remaining attributed recipes are from individuals. A portion of these individuals are identified in the cookbook by their name and location, suggesting the compiler of the recipes had contacts within the state of Ohio in Akron, Newark, Sandusky, Columbus and Dover and with persons residing in Pennsylvania and Virginia (marked in purple on the map). My hunch is that the individuals lacking locations, the majority of the individuals appearing in the cookbook, were the compiler’s close friends and neighbors.

Once again, cookbooks prove to be powerful tools for better understanding the lives of ordinary women. When mapped, these sources reveal the far-flung nature of Grandmother Rappe’s connections and influences. Of particular note and deserving of more research, is the greater significance of newspapers and almanacs as sources of recipes and domestic advice.  What prompted women to create manuscript recipe books? Does the compilation of the Rappe Family recipe book reveal something about the availability of printed cookbooks in early nineteenth-century Ohio? Did collecting recipes from newspapers and friends provide a low-cost means for women to create personalized recipe books?

 


[1] Mrs. E.A. Phelps, Cookbook [1800?-1899?] Doc. 47 Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Library, Winterthur, DE 19735.

[2] Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks they Wrote, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13.

The map for this post was created using arcGIS.com and can also be viewed here.