By Rachel E. Church and Anna Faherty
Among the artifacts preserved in the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine is a curious set of two meticulously prepared recipe scrapbooks. These books contain both Franco-American and other popular recipes from the time period in which they were created. However, what makes these books particularly interesting is that one is entirely of French language magazine clippings and one of English language. They appear clean and unused and the creator rarely wrote in the margins except to tell us when to turn the page over – in English for the English book, and in French for the French book.
The “Franco” in the name of the “Franco-American Collection” refers to people who immigrated to the U.S. from Quebec and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Materials at the Collection relate to this community in Lewiston-Auburn and other areas of Maine, and include but are not limited to: scrapbooks, oral histories, photographs, letters, and French language newspapers. The recipe scrapbooks in question bring together both the scrapbook and cookbook mediums, as well as both the French and English languages, in ways that speak to the wider body of documentation held at the archive and help us better understand the Franco-American experience.
The English scrapbook features clipping from Ladies’ Home Journal from approximately 1937-1951. We can tell this because header information with the magazine name and issue dates remain, and there are many references to dates in advertisements on the backside of the recipe clippings. The clippings include a mix of French-Canadian, international, and American recipes, some labeled with “How America Lives.” While the French-language scrapbook includes almost exclusively French Canadian recipes, the English-language book’s recipes are more diverse in their national origins and include many that teach or highlight American cuisine and culture.
The French book’s origins were harder to determine because the edges where the magazine name and date would be had been cut off. However, the byline under many of the recipe columns reads: “Mme. Rose Lacroix Directrice de L’Institute Ménager de LA REVUE POPULAIRE et du SAMDEI.” We determined this referenced the French-Canadian magazine La Revue Populaire. A conversation with a Collection community member revealed that it was as ubiquitous as Ladies Home Journal for the local French-speaking community.
There were only two instances of printed dates in advertisements: one referencing an event from May 30 to June 10, 1949 and another mentioning “Depuis 1943,” “En 1950,” and, “plus tard le 15 avril, 1950…” (English translation: “Since 1943, “In 1950,” and “later on April 15, 1950…”). The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec has full issues of La Revue Populaire online. Starting with these clues, we found 14 of our clippings in their archive. The issue dates span 1945-1951, overlapping with our English scrapbook which also stops in 1951.
In the past, donations to the Collection may not have had corresponding accession paperwork. This seems to be the case with these scrapbooks, so it is difficult to trace their creator. Due to the label “Prevost” on each inside cover, it is likely that was the creator’s last name. After searching through Maine obituaries and cemetery records, we found at least 10 results of women by that name who were born between 1870-1925. As many materials at the Collection are donated by individuals local to Lewiston-Auburn, it is likely that this donor was as well. Two plausible options are Cora Mathieu Prevost and Therese Landry Prevost, the first and second wives, respectively, of Alban Prevost of Lewiston. The Mathieu family is known to have donated other material to the Collection, and Therese was born and raised in Quebec and had family there, likely having a strong connection with French-Canadian culture and language.
As Ellen Gruber Garvey explains in her book Writing with Scissors, women have created scrapbooks of curated information, including recipes, for nearly 200 years. Furthermore, Janet Theophano tells us that manuscript cookbooks, also called recipe books, go back even farther to at least the 17th century (8). These handmade cookbooks and domestic manuals were created by individuals, typically women, who compiled handwritten recipes alongside recipes clipped from media or shared by family and friends for their own use and/or to pass down to younger generations.
Of note, our books show no signs of use in the kitchen: no drips or stains, recipe alterations, or marginalia beyond “tournez / turn page,” evidence which Ken Albala identifies as “evidence that someone interacted directly with the text and actually cooked the recipe[s]” (230). This could be because their creator made them for her own use but then didn’t use them, or because she made them specifically to pass down to others who did not use them for cooking.
That the two recipe scrapbooks are separated into two different languages leads us to believe that they may not have been for the maker’s own use. We can assume the maker was bilingual: not only did she select content from both French- and English-language magazines, but she also wrote text to indicate when to flip the page in both English and French. If she were creating a scrapbook for her own use, why not include recipes from both languages in one scrapbook? If these were simply each a collection of recipes from favorite magazines, organized by magazine, why make sure that the limited marginalia is in the same language as the clipped text? All together this suggests that these may have been made to pass down to two different audiences, possibly children or grandchildren, one French-speaking and one non-French speaking.
In the 1950s, there was a linguistic shift happening in the Maine Franco community. According to an interview with memorist and teacher Denis Ledoux, this was a “transformational” period during which the community went from a more insular, monolingual group to a less insular, bilingual group, continuing to maintain their culture. In his memoir French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood, Ledoux recalls that as children, he and his siblings made an effort to speak in French to younger relatives. Younger children were more likely to be exposed to English earlier than their older siblings, due to siblings speaking it, radio and television programming, and other factors, thus becoming more familiar with English than French. Therefore, it is very plausible that within the same family during the 1950s, such as our Prevost family, the older siblings would grow up with the ability to speak and/or read French, while the younger siblings would not.
If we assume these cookbooks were passed down to younger relatives, even though there is no evidence of cooking use, it does not mean they did not serve another important function. Scholars such as Janet Theophano, Daine Tye, Eleanora Sava, Laura Jiga Iliescu discuss how handmade recipe books act as valuable memory objects of people, family relationships, cultural traditions, and personal histories, even if the recipes are no longer cooked by the current generation because of changing tastes and nutritional trends. Therefore, this curious pair of French and English language recipe scrapbooks, even though there is no evidence of cooking use, may have still acted as treasured reminders of the person who made them, family memories, and cultural transitions during a period of change for the Maine Franco-American community.
References List
Albala, Ken. “Cookbooks as Historical Documents.” In The Oxford Handbook of Food History. (2012): 227–240.
Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Tye, Diane. Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.
Rachel E. Church is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher in Maine. She holds a MFA in Intermedia and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Maine. Her doctoral dissertation, Pages in-between: Intermedia Art between Cookbooks and Artists’ Books, focused on identifying and analyzing intermedia work in the space between cookbooks and artists’ books through the lens of intermediality and feminist research methodologies. Additional career highlights include publication of “Cooking Up Maine History: Sense of Place and Community Cookbooks” in Maine History and the 2023 Baxter Society Grand Prize in Book Arts for Women of Windy Hill. In addition to her art and research practice, she works as digital accessibility specialist, teaches art courses and workshops, and enjoys traveling, cooking, camping, hiking, and sewing.
Anna Faherty holds an MA in History and a MS in Library Science with a concentration in archives. She is the archivist & curator at the Franco-American Collection, located on the Lewiston, ME campus of the University of Southern Maine. As the solo arranger at the Collection, she: manages volunteers, interns and student workers, provides K-12 and university level instruction on primary sources and Franco-American history in Maine, coordinates community events, accepts archival donations, assists researchers, processes collections, and engages in preventative preservation practices to help meet the Collection’s mission to preserve and promote the Franco-American culture and history in Maine. Anna sits on the Maine Historical Records Advisory Board (MHRAB), and is a former board member of the Maine Library Association (MLA).