Tag Archives: Community Cookbook

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book: Community Building in Beirut

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By Jennifer Brannock

On September 21, 1950, E. Gertrude Joly gave a talk about the women of Lebanon at the Royal Central Asian Society, a British society founded in 1901 focusing on the history and culture of Asia. In her speech, she described the diverse roles of women in the country, from educated Lebanese women advocating for equal rights (Lebanese women did get the right to vote in 1951) to village women who cared for their households while working in the homes of British families in Beirut. Even though Joly differentiates between the women of Lebanon, partially because of the audience at her talk, she celebrates the foodways of the women and culture, but with a caveat. “Arab cookery is very good, but you have to get used to it gradually – it is hard on Anglo-Saxon digestions until they have got used to it.”

Cover of the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

In the 1940s, Joly and a group associated with the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.) in Beirut, Lebanon, compiled the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book to highlight local and Western recipes. In the book, Joly refers to the dishes as Syrian, which may be a holdover from the time before Lebanese independence. It may also acknowledge the culinary overlap between Syrian and Lebanese cuisines. The cookbook was created to serve three purposes:

  1. “To supply the newcomer (generally a bride coming out to live in a country whose vegetables and dishes are unknown to her but popular with her husband) a book to guide her steps in the first anxious days of striving to “feed the brute.” 
  2. “To supply to those who live in the Near East something definite in ideas for the arranging of new and varied menus suitable to the country.” 
  3. “To supply to the Y.W.C.A a book, the sale of which may bring in an income to help in the furnishing of their annual summer camp in Lebanon.” 

The book had a broad potential audience, and to further the goal of making this book accessible to locals and expats, each recipe is printed in English and Arabic. In the preface, following the goals and purposes of the cookbook, Joly writes how disappointed she is in the book. “I regret that my original intention of committing to paper a representative set of Syrian dishes has been far from realized. The response to my appeal for such dishes was not as hearty nor as spontaneous as I could have wished…” 

With the combination of Lebanese, English, and some American recipes, Joly wanted to create a community of people, food, and culture through The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book, and in her own words, she believes she failed. 

Recipe for Tamale Pie from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Why weren’t there more local dishes submitted? There could be numerous guesses as to why. Maybe the call for submissions was not as broad as needed. Most of the women who submitted recipes were probably expats married to professors or businessmen in Beirut. These women were not from Lebanon and probably employed local women to prepare meals in their homes. Another reason may be that the local women did not want to submit their recipes to a cookbook that could potentially put them out of a job. The Lebanese cooks in expat households relied on their recipes and cooking skills to maintain employment and publicizing their recipes makes their main commodities available to anyone who had the book. 

One wonders if the community that Joly hoped to bring together couldn’t be formed because the community didn’t exist in day-to-day lives. Joly infers in her talk to the Royal Central Asian Society that there were the wealthy expats like her, the educated Lebanese women who were pushing for equal rights, and the village women who helped in the expat homes. Maybe the emphasis wasn’t on creating a human community, but more of a diversity in recipes?

Recipe for Majadarah from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Lebanese recipes included in the cookbook are few, but include dishes that are well known today. Simple dishes like Houmous Tahini, Mjadarah (a rice, lentil, and onion dish), and Kibbeh highlight the food of the local culture. More unique recipes like The Dervish’s Rosary (great name!) and Mouloukeya found their way into the book as well. 

Recipe for The Dervish’s Rosary from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

From a Veal à la Marengo (a French classic) to the American Southwest’s tamale pie to a section on scones, the bulk of The Y.W.C.A Cookery Book focuses on European classics and wartime versions of English recipes. The European and American recipes incorporate some local ingredients, but most require tapioca pudding, Robinson’s Patent Barley, and other ingredients that were only found at specialty stores in Beirut. If anything, many of the recipes submitted don’t encourage community and seemingly emphasize the differences between the cultures. 

An advertisement from Anis Nasif, the proprietor of a grocery at the American University in Beirut, stating that he carries American groceries that can be used to prepare recipes in The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

It’s unknown how many copies of the cookbook were sold. What we know is that in 1950, E. Gertrude Joly published The English-Arabic Cookery Book. It’s evident from the preface that this cookbook is a copy of The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book without attribution to the people who submitted recipes or contribution to the money donated to support the Y.W.C.A. Perhaps Joly believed that having edited the first edition, and likely contributed many of its recipes, she was entitled to revise the formatting and modify some of the recipes for a new edition under her name. She continued with her initial mission of providing a book of recipes for the young bride new to Lebanon, but her initial goal of creating a community cookbook had been left behind.

References 

Joly, Mrs. Gertrude. “The Women of Lebanon.” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society. 38 (1951): 177-184.

Jennifer Brannock is Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has a BA in Art History and an MSLS from the University of Kentucky. In 2011, Jennifer started collecting Mississippi community cookbooks for Special Collections. Over 150 of these cookbooks are digitized and available in USM’s Digital Collections. Since starting the collection, she has hosted events highlighting the collection and given talks to local women’s groups, as well as conference presentations in Mississippi, the United States, and in Kazakhstan about the importance of cookbooks in local history and genealogy research. 

In 2020, Jennifer received the American Library Association/Reference and User Services’ Genealogy/History Achievement Award, recognizing her work with the cookbook collection among other achievements. She is active in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (Vice-chair/Secretary for the Local History and Genealogy Section) and the Society of Mississippi Archivists (President).

 

American Studies, Culinary History, Food and Drink, Modern, Summer 2024

Community Cookbooks as Mapping Resources

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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.