Tag Archives: Collecting culinary recipes

Side Dishes and Supplemented Reading: Sammelrezepte in West German Women’s Magazines

By Ellen Barth

The recipes from aunts, the paper, and friends,

that have been collected over years without end,

often lie in a box out of view,

lost to the clutter and daily rush, too.

But that should not happen, not anymore—

we’re hoping to make it less of a chore.

This little folder here is just the right book,

filled with good recipes ready to cook.

The above poem, loosely translated from the original German, appears in a recipe booklet by the food seasoning company Maggi, published sometime in the 1950s. The poem positions traditional handwritten recipe cards as disorganized, ephemeral, and—at least implicitly—old-fashioned. The booklet, on the other hand, is printed and conveniently punched with holes so that it could be included in a binder, perhaps one full of such branded, promotional recipes.

Around the same time that food companies like Maggi were nudging cooks to rely less on manuscript recipes handed down through generations and more on their printed output, women’s magazines in West Germany (1949-1990) were also turning the collection of magazine recipes into a marketing tool by encouraging readers to collect and bind printed recipes in new ways.    

A striking example of how women’s magazines tied recipes to the practice of collecting appears in Petra: Die moderne Frau, first published in 1964 and, at that time, one of only two monthly women’s magazines in West Germany. As well as giving advice on fashion, home decoration, and beauty products, cooking was a common element of Petra. However, in the early issues, few recipes were included in the magazine’s pages. Instead, during the 1960s, Petra readers received a separate recipe supplement with each issue. These supplements, numbered and with changing themes, could be collected and bound in a Petra binder—an advertisement for which can be found on the back cover of the June 1967 supplement.

Fig. 1. Image courtesy of the author.

Magazines have often inspired collecting behavior, being a lesser acknowledged branch on the book collecting tree. In Germany as well as other countries, magazines on various topics have sold branded binders that could hold multiple periodical issues together, a practice that dates back at least to the nineteenth century and the “strap file and binder” format. Examples of this from German magazines include Auto Motor und Sport, Funkschau, and the pornographic Frivol, all of which have sold branded Sammelmappe (collection binders) for collecting their issues, with affordances listed as keeping issues neatly together, attractiveness, and, in the case of Frivol, a neutral spine that did not reveal the contents.

Petra’s binders for collecting recipe supplements offered their readers a new twist on this old collector’s classic. Writing about the purpose of printed supplements, Yanick Rice Lamb states that these “were often intended to infuse spice […] and provide added value[.]” In German, this metaphor is especially apt, considering that the word for supplement (Beilage) is the same as the word for an edible side dish. As well as adding “spice” through additional content in the form of cooking advice, the supplements were used by Petra’s publishers to turn readers into collectors and offered an alternative way to engage with the magazine.

Fig. 2. Image courtesy of the author.

Into the 1970s, Petra’s recipe supplements disappeared but the collection of recipes nevertheless remained. Collectible Sammelrezepte were printed in the magazine’s pages with pictures of the dishes on one side and recipes on the other, often with four recipes on a single page. The recipes were meant to be cut out—helpfully marked with an icon of an open pair of scissors and dashed lines—and then gathered and bound in a Petra-branded binder. In this reader-to-collector strategy, Petra was not alone. In the 1970s and 80s, the magazine Brigitte also published Sammelrezepte and sold its own branded recipe binder—the Brigitte Rezeptbuch—with the added benefit of organizational dividers based on food type.

Vintage binders filled with cut-out magazine recipes are somewhat rare to find (they themselves are not yet viewed as valuable collector’s items), but surviving examples attest to how these collections incentivized regular magazine purchases, extending and deepening engagement in a kind of brand-oriented practice of reading, curating, and collecting. The examples from my own private collection—one purchased online and one found at a free little bookshelf—demonstrate media loyalty, with each only including recipes from their respective magazines. The organization of those recipes is, however, a more personal and creative matter. Although the Brigitte binder suggests a specific organizational structure through the inclusion of dividers, how the individual reader interprets—or perhaps ignores—those categories is up to them: for example, the collector who chose to put the recipe for pizza in the baked goods section next to sweet Quarkstollen, presumably because it is cooked in the oven.

Fig. 3. Image courtesy of the author.

Although this kind of collecting and organizing of recipes may have little in common with the rhetorical remix prominent in recipe notecards and scrapbooks, it nonetheless reflects an active engagement with and remixing of mass media. Through magazine supplements, printed recipes, and branded binders, West German women participated as readers, cooks, and collectors to create unique recipe books that blended mass culture with personal taste.


Ellen Barth works at the Chair of Book Studies, University of Münster. Her monograph Contradictory Cookbooks: Print, Protest, and Feminism in Women’s Community Cookbooks will be published by the University of Georgia Press in late 2026, and she has also published research on the topics of feminist craftivism, menstrual activism, and political cookbooks. Originally from the United States, she now resides in Germany.

Stretching the Boundaries

By Lino Mioni

Roselli, G. d. Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci de ogni sorte, et fare sapori, torte, et pastelli al modo de tutte le provincie / [giovanni de roselli]. Venice: 1538. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Roselli, G. d. Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci de ogni sorte, et fare sapori, torte, et pastelli al modo de tutte le provincie / [giovanni de roselli]. Venice: 1538. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Collating together in one single volume the medical and culinary knowledge and recipes, or any other form of instructions, of food preservation and fermentation, is an activity that has been performed by many social groups, regardless of size (be it family, estate, professional association, church, congregation). Usually in manuscript form, these recipe collections are the essence of shared culinary traditions and common knowledge and, ultimately, they are brought into existence by a desire to protect and preserve that knowledge and traditions for future generations. 

Not having the tangible economic value and purpose of their printed counterparts, manuscript culinary recipe collections represent a type of text that can offer a wide range of analysis exactly because of their more intrinsically personal and variable nature. Due to their different origins, scope, and purpose, these manuscript recipe collections can assume varied forms; they can be prepared exclusively for personal use or for collective fruition; they can be prepared to be shared with individuals outside of the social group or not; they can be created for simply preserving the common shared knowledge of a specific social group or to praise and extol the social group that produced them; and they can also be considered as cultural objects. These different types of culinary recipe collections are the focus of Kernan’s and Müllneritsch’s edited volume Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800. The nine contributions to the edited volume focus on culinary texts: the way these nine contributions are organized within the edited volume richly illustrates the wide scope of the research being done on manuscript culinary texts while, and at the same time, it stretches the boundaries of the research field itself. 

Ultimately, culinary texts are fascinating due to the low degree of authorship they display. One can claim authorship of a story, of a poem, of a play, or an idea, but is it even conceivable claiming authorship of the set of instructions for a culinary preparation, which is, by definition, shared and common knowledge? Although a person might inscribe herself/himself as the initial compiler of a manuscript recipe collection, this person is just the organizer and editor of the chosen contents. Moreover, in case of family recipe collections more than one initial individual might collaborate by commenting on, adding to, and expanding the recipes of the original collection.

Two concepts that stand out throughout the volume are recipe collection and dissemination. Collecting recipes, when it comes to manuscripts culinary recipe compendia, at least in early modern and modern times, implies combining personal or household traditions with knowledge from attestors(such as geographical region or personal connection via recipes offered by friends, a person from another family, etc.), along with other information collated and collected from a variety of other sources: printed books, other publications, etc. In this latter case, although not impossible, the source of that recipe is not always easy to trace. Culinary recipe collections dissemination, although much easily detectable when it comes to printed cookbooks, is also present in the manuscript tradition. Recipes can be translated and transcribed in another language, giving access to culinary traditions of foreign countries. In this respect the chapters on Sir Martin’s Westcombe’s Iberian Recipes by Annamaria Valent and on Finnish manuscript recipe books by Maren Jonasson and Märtha Norrback are particularly interesting since, although in different social and historical contexts, they reveal how not only culinary recipes and food preparations but ingredients can be disseminated beyond geographical and regional boundaries.

I mentioned before that Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 by Sarah Peters Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch stretches the boundaries of the research field that focuses on manuscript recipe books. By giving a wider geographical scope to the research being done, this volume will not only entice further research and investigation, but also, and hopefully, expand the representation of other culinary traditions within the European continent within the research community.

Lino Mioni is Subject Librarian for Romance Languages and Literatures, Latin American Studies, and Linguistics at Washington University in St Louis Libraries. In his PhD dissertation (Indiana University 2020), he analyzes the 14th and 15th century traditions of culinary recipe collections of the Italian peninsula and investigates how these recipe collections are reappropriated and disseminated in printed editions. The introduction of print changed, among many other things, how culinary knowledge was produced, shared, and, consequently, used. Maestro Martino, and the manuscripts attributed to him, are a paradigmatic example of how a culinary recipe collection in manuscript form were used and circulated through print and by print. The many printed editions of the Epulario, which take the text from the Maestro Martino’s tradition, shed light on the editorial success a culinary recipe collection can have once it is transposed from manuscript to printed form, as well as on the characteristics of 16th and 17th century popular print culture.