Tag Archives: cookbooks

The Imagined, Implied, and Authentic Audiences of an American Settlement House Cookbook

By Kimberly S. Baker, PhD
In early 20th-century Milwaukee, a Midwestern American industrial city, social reformer Lizzie Kander and her fellow aid workers published a community cookbook (of sorts). Kander and colleagues ran “The Settlement,” a settlement house that supported and acclimated immigrant Jewish families to urban American living, offering social services, arts and culture opportunities, and classes including English and civics (Fritz). The Settlement Cookbook began as the instructional text for its cooking class for young women and girls. The settlement house movement generally held that adopting American ways of living included adopting American culinary habits (Ziegelman, 160); thus, settlement-style cooking classes introduced immigrants to mainstream American food.

The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This cookbook and its historical and cultural context, audiences, and communicative goals introduce a “community” where imagined, implied, and authentic audiences converge. 

Settlement house initiatives can be understood as contact zones, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” (Pratt, 1991). In these contact zones, people with social power and economic means strive to influence the lives of less-privileged people, and lower-status settlement house patrons receive services provided by higher-status workers, who themselves benefit, emotionally, culturally, and socially, from giving aid.

The uneven relationships present in settlement houses relies on forms of authoritative power which are also fundamental to advice literature, including household manuals, where higher-status authors instruct and make recommendations to their supposedly lower-status readers (Dorfman, 4). If authors write to advise an implied audience of their own peers, intending that authentic (lower-status) readers were “listening in” for guidance necessary to rise socially, group boundaries become more visible. Such advice is believed to be valuable because “correct” behavior indicates who belongs.

These were dynamics which Kander herself understood very well. Settlement “stood for domestic science;” she argued in The Settlement’s 1899 president’s report, and cooking class trained girls to “do battle with the industrialized world,” and, “equip [them] to become economical and efficient homemakers and intelligent Mothers.”(Annual Report, 1899). Precision and formality reflect the institutional authority of classroom texts and the then-emerging home-economics discipline with its scientific jargon. Cookbook instructions outline techniques, as well as specify cooking tools, brand-name ingredients, and prepared foods.

Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

However, the Settlement’s authentic students were likely more experienced cooks than the start-with-the-basics instructions suggest. While Kander and her circle belonged to Reformed Jewish synagogues, the Settlement’s immigrant patrons followed more conservative religious practice, and kept Kosher (Fritz). The students’ kitchen skills were homegrown, as young Jewish girls learned religious food guidelines and traditional food preparation through helping their mothers (Ziegelman, 95-7). This oral tradition familiar to the immigrant students contrasts with the settlement house’s formal, institutional approach. Kander’s president’s report acknowledges these divergent norms, explaining that the cooking class was “obliged to conduct the lessons on the ‘Kosher’ plan—as the children adhered strictly to the orthodox rules of cooking,” (1899).

Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

That cultural accommodation soon faded; Kander’s notes (1898) for the initial classroom cookbook address Kosher practices, including defining Kosher cooking, dishes for milk and meat meals, meat preparation, and washing (with soda, not soap, which contained “mixed materials”). In the 1903 printed edition, nods to Kosher practices are minimal; non-compliant recipes such as for shellfish, and meat with dairy, feature among its pages. This cookbook content aligned with the non-Kosher eating habits of the local, middle-class, German, Reformed-Jewish community, rather than the settlement house students.

Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

In reflecting the broader local community, the cookbook not only gains potential readers, but also legitimacy by association with them. Community authority (and approval) offers students a permission structure to discard strict, traditional norms and adopt American cuisine.

That affluent, German-Jewish community was also a key cookbook audience, supporting The Settlement and funding the cookbook itself: Kander initially sought to publish the recipes for classroom efficiency, so students could spend class time cooking, not copying. The Settlement’s all-male directors denied this funding request as extravagant, so the women and their publisher instead sold advertisements in the cookbook, many to businesses owned by Kander’s social peers. Students bought copies for a reduced fee; a local department store sold surplus cookbooks to the public. The initial 1901 print run sold out within the year, and proceeds from subsequent editions, edited by Kander herself, funded The Settlement through its first nine years (Fritz). 

The cookbook’s advertising sections showcased luxury goods and services that reinforced the sophisticated, middle-class living invoked by the recipes. While the lifestyle advertised was likely unattainable for the immigrant student audience, the women whose families owned the businesses that purchased ads were more realistic customers. The ads may also have reinforced the ad buyers’ altruism by publicizing who else bought ads and supported the cause.

The cookbook may appear a rhetorical flop, delivering strict, novice-level instruction to knowledgeable students, proscribing a cuisine that challenges students’ religious norms, and advertising an unattainable lifestyle. Instructors with social status and wealth advised newcomers that being American meant following these guidelines. Yet, despite apparent shortcomings of audience analysis, the cookbook remained popular, locally, and nationally, for decades, blending tradition with American tastes and the changing times.

REFERENCES:

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues 12.1 (1992): 21-38.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (2004): 36-49. 

Kander, Mrs. Simon. and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook.  Milwaukee: The Settlement. 1903. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. 2010.

— Annual Report: Milwaukee Jewish Mission. June 6, 1899. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 2 Folder 11) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

—-Notebook. “Cooking Lesson Book.” 1898. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 1 Folder 10) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Ziegelman, J. 97 Orchard: An edible history of five immigrant families in one New York tenement. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. 2010.


Dr. Kimberly Baker is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, in Milwaukee, WI, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication. Her research interests include The Settlement Cookbook, and its author, social reformer Lizzie Black Kander, as well as workplace communication and the experience of user-experience (UX) professionals in organizations. She is at work on a co-authored book about everyday rhetoric for undergraduate STEM students.

Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach

We prepared this traditional lunch when my cousin visited our place as a part of her wedding rituals. This meal includes rice, shukto (mixed vegetables), dal, prawn malai curry, fried potato and nuts, begun bahar (masala eggplant), mutton curry, pomfret with poppy seeds, and shorshe ilish (hilsa mustard gravy). It took more than sixteen hours to cook all of the dishes mentioned here. Photo courtesy of the author.

By Agnibha Maity
In Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth century made way for women writers to archive and standardise recipes. It was at this time when Calcutta, now Kolkata, became the epicentre of food experiments and restaurant culture in India. Restaurants and taverns were run mainly by chefs trained to satisfy European taste buds. They revolutionised the traditional methods and changed the character of dishes with the ingredients borrowed from the West. For example, potatoes – found in every other Bengali dish, even in the famous Calcutta-style Biriyani – appeared on the Bengali platter only by the nineteenth century. The story for cauliflower – many winter cuisines are incomplete without it – is almost similar; colonisers introduced the cultivation of many such vegetables in Bengal. Before the advent of the Britishers, Medieval Bengal depended on rice, curd, fish, local leafy greens, preparations of pulses, and a handful of vegetables such as banana flowers and eggplants. Although Bengalis did not let go of any of the medieval dishes, a lunch or dinner menu from a contemporary household will show more familiarity with the preparation styles invented or modified in colonial times. It was Bengali middle-class women who were responsible for the standardisation of modern cooking practices with their meticulous everyday experimentations, and this evolution of recipes can be traced in many cookbooks written by women authors since the publication of Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish O Niramish Ahar in 1902.

Leela Majumdar’s cookbook, Rannar Boi (1979), co-authored by her daughter Kamala Chattopadhyay, follows the long tradition of archiving recipes but with exceptional care for women’s labour and nutrition in general. She was a gifted author of her time and belonged to one of the most renowned families of Kolkata. However, this cookbook does not belong to her oeuvre as a literary figure in Bengal but serves as a practical handbook for homemakers. She intended this to be a handy companion for everyday cooking. Traditional cooking methods used to be laborious because most of the dishes needed manual grinding of masalas and multi-step heating, and the hot climate forced women to prepare meals twice a day. A typical dish, such as kochu shaker ghonto (taro leaf mishmash), as found in Amish O Niramish Ahar and even in the recent The Calcutta Cookbook, requires the mixing of various spices, grating coconuts, adding pastes of cumin, chilli, and ginger. Cutting the stalks is also a professional task – the outer layer must be removed and washed with salt, or else calcium oxalate crystals might irritate throats. What is interesting about Leela Majumdar’s cookbook is that she avoids any nostalgic remembrance of tedious cooking rituals which exploited women’s labour. In the preface, she declares, “Don’t forget the dishes, but the recipes must be slightly altered… We intend that cooking no meal should take more than two hours.” She focuses on cleanliness, adopting modern kitchenware, and improving hygiene. She contrasts starkly with Europeans or Americans who prefer preparing one main dish per meal to save time for other work, such as a chicken roast accompanied by baked potato or salads. Her recipe notebook is plain and straightforward; there are no East-West divisions. It begins with varieties of soups, which Bengali elite society first tasted during the bloom of restaurant culture in the mid-nineteenth century.  From Scotch broth, tomato soup, and minestrone, she jumps to Bengali Khichdi, sour and bitter lentils, with ease. Her cookbook blurs the distinction other contemporary books celebrate, and her addition of practical notes entitled “The intricacies of homemaking,” along with simplified recipes in lucid Bengali, make the book friendly for readers of all backgrounds and education levels. 

Agnibha Maity is a PhD candidate and a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. He obtained his M.A. and B.A. from the University of Calcutta. His PhD topic focuses on gendered identity in archival discourses. His research interests include subaltern studies, archival studies, and South Asian gender history. He loves discovering lost recipes from rural Bengal and archiving them when possible.

A Connecticut Yankee in Texas

By Meli Alexander
Growing up in a small state like Connecticut in the 1970s was a great time to be an aspiring chef. Sandwiched between bigger states and bigger cities shaped Hartford Connecticut’s cuisine: NYC-style Chinese takeout, with its ubiquitous packets of duck sauce and hot mustard; Italian-American delights such as baked ziti or sausage and peppers; and Boston deep-fried cod and clams. These foods woke up my taste buds and my curiosity about the world.

Despite the terrible school lunch options offered at my elementary school, I always looked forward to Pizza Fridays. In Connecticut, this meant a Sicilian-style American pizza, thick and hearty, in a perfect rectangular shape. But I couldn’t help but wonder what other pizza styles were out there…just waiting to be discovered.

I knew I had a hidden talent about coming up with my own recipes, especially focusing on food combinations. By age five I was creating fun ice cream flavors such as maraschino cherries and vanilla ice cream. I also studied the very first cookbook I ever saw, which was a community cookbook from my grandmother’s beloved home in New Brunswick, Canada. It was a peek into another culture and I had no idea of the scope of recipes that were waiting for me around the corner.

In 1979, my mother made a huge decision that changed the way I see the world through food. Our sudden  move to Pasadena, Texas was more traumatic than I have ever let on, despite the thrill of flying first class. Being uprooted from everything I knew — my home, my school, my church — was surreal. Trying to understand the heavy Texas accents alone was beyond challenging.

I did my best to fit into my new world. We lived in a huge apartment complex and had year-round access to a swimming pool. My brother and I became latchkey kids. This gave us a lot of freedom mixed with responsibilities, and I did a lot of grocery shopping and cooking.

Thanks to a few of my new neighbors, I also learned about Tex-Mex and Southern cooking. One of my neighbors was a stay-at-home mother, and I absolutely adored her. She was warm and gracious, the classic example of Southern hospitality and charm, and one of the first things she did was to teach me how to make pecan pralines with their signature gooeyness and creaminess. The recipe was found in a community cookbook, which  became a portal into a new culinary world. I was surprised to see many versions of the same recipe but later realized that this was a common feature of community cookbooks.

My neighbor lent me that cookbook for inspiration, and I learned even more about ingredients and dishes that I had never heard of: okra, jalapeño chiles, tamales. My perception of food expanded and honestly, become an addiction! It even influenced my bold choice of constantly trading in my homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a hot meal at my junior high school.

With very little allowance money (despite all of the chores I had to do), I always tried to come up with the 85 cents required for a meal at school. I tried delicious meals featuring fried okra, burritos, and tacos. However, Fridays were never quite the same without Sicilian-style pizza. My pizza cravings were about to change…

One Saturday, my brother and I were taken out to lunch by that wonderful lady who taught me how to make pecan pralines. I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant, but Tex-Mex pizza was featured on the menu. I never had anything like it; I was so used to my favorite toppings of pepperoni and mushrooms. Seeing “new” toppings such as chorizo, jalapeño chiles, and cilantro blew my ten-year-old mind. I was in culinary heaven.

Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.
Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.

That single meal expanded my desire to experiment with ingredients. Before I knew it, I was exchanging recipe ideas with some of the mothers in my apartment complex. One idea I remember sharing was taco salad, using Doritos instead of regular tortilla chips for added flavor and depth.

By my eleventh birthday, I accepted the fact that I was in charge of grocery shopping and cooking for my family. That Christmas, I opened up one of my presents and it was a Crockpot (or so I thought). However, when I opened the box, it was a wonderful and soft teddy bear. This was a reminder I was still a kid, despite some grown-up responsibilities. 

Soon after that Christmas, my mother ended her relationship with her partner, and we moved back to Connecticut. I never had the chance to return the community cookbook I borrowed, but it had permanently changed my culinary repertoire. Despite how challenging life was in Pasadena, I am forever grateful to our apartment complex neighbors for helping me to learn about an entirely new cuisine. Tex-Mex will always be one of my favorites.

Now, I always encourage people to try new ingredients and dishes. One of the cool things about a particular kind of cuisine is to embrace the regional differences. Recipes are really just guidelines. Most community cookbooks will have slight variations of the same dish. It is up to you to find your favorite version of a classic recipe and share it with your loved ones.

Meli Alexander has been passionate and — honestly, obsessed — about genealogy after going to a family reunion in New Brunswick, Canada when she was a pre-teen. Her love and respect for international cuisines started much earlier; living in New York City fueled that fire. In 2004, Meli made the life-changing decision to go to culinary school. She graduated from the one-year culinary program at the Art Institute of Seattle with honors. Her experience includes working at an Italian restaurant, Whole Foods Market, and a truffle café at the famed Pike Place Market. During the COVID pandemic, Meli put her acting career aside and focused purely on genealogy, joining a vast community of fellow genealogists on social media. Struggling to find her place in that amazing and collaborative world, Meli was inspired by genealogists such as Gena Philibert-Ortega and Michael W. Twitty, authors who combine genealogy with food. Defining herself as a Culinary Genealogist, “a person who combines the disciplines of food and genealogy,” Meli reinvented herself as The DNA Chef in 2022.

Critically Making Games from Historical Cookbooks

By Alessandra Zinicola Lopez

To make something edible is arguably the anticipated end-expectation of the design and use of any food recipe. Making is entwined with cookery, from the writing of its instruction, guided by the experimentation involved in developing a recipe, through the tactile creation process of the consumable result.

As scholars, we can approach the study of recipes from different perspectives. My educational background is in technical communication, but my doctoral work has been done through the University of Central Florida’s innovative digital humanities program, Texts and Technology.

Within this program I typically focus on historical domestic technical communication, the old receipts that instructed Americans for centuries on how to run households. But rather than solely approaching my research from methods historians or technical communicators might default to, I approach my work like a digital humanist, and have found critical making to be useful in exploring my studies.

In this article I aim to introduce the critical making research method to recipes research by showcasing a digital exercise I have completed using it. Through this, I hope to encourage other recipe scholars to experiment with this method.

In Ratto’s 2011 publication of Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, the author writes about critical making merging concepts of critical thinking and pragmatic physical making together to create a process-focused way of deriving knowledge.

Ratto explains the method includes three stages: a literature review, prototyping, and reconfiguration, discussion, and reflection. The method is performed to bridge gaps between technology and society.

The critical making process can be interactive or collaborative and various digital tools can be used to perform it. In this exercise I used Twine, an open-source hypertext platform that allows for the formation of scholarship through online interactive non-linear narratives. I would describe it as a tool to create a digital choose-your-own-adventure.

Image Credit: Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/poeticalcookbook00moss/page/n8/mode/1up

I worked with Twine to explore a historical cookbook that interested me because of its creative use of poetry to instruct meal preparation. The book is Maria J. Moss’ A Poetical Cook-Book, a community cookbook originally published in 1864 during the American Civil War. An aim of the project was to generate public and scholarly interest in historical recipes through gamification. I thought that perhaps a younger, technologically savvy audience might have their interest in American culinary history piqued through a digitally interactive experience. I used the critical making research process to create a hypertext narrative game based on the cookbook.

The following is an abbreviated example of the show-your-work type of documentation done during the prototyping stage of critical making.

To begin, I consulted Twine’s discussion boards and searched for tutorial videos on using the platform. I wanted to create all the passages and arrange them in the way I felt would make sense to a user. While it was easy to select and place each recipe, it was harder to figure out how to lead up to them, transition between them, and end the journey.

In the next passages, I offered information about the project, and I allowed the recipes to be accessed in the order of what people typically consume during mealtimes, and additionally in any other way they want to access them (i.e., dessert for dinner). After I added all the recipes, I played with how they could link together. It was then that I realized the way to click through them could be a conversation between the user or attendee and the host.

Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/

I eventually ordered the passages and links together as pictured above. I then started to fiddle with color. I used a tutorial to guide me through the tips on how to change the font within the stylesheet. While I was initially successful in finding fonts and colors for the game, I ran into some issues.

I tried to figure out why my colors displayed incorrectly. I had copied and pasted code from a forum discussion response that claimed to be a coding answer. Revisiting it, I realized there was code missing. Once I added it, the issue was solved. This type of refashioning constituted a reconfiguration portion of the project.

Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/

I felt the exercise in gamifying a historical cookbook was successful and well received. Through the process of critical making, I found that it has provided a path to be more creative as a scholar by exemplifying the traditional ways of generating knowledge are not the only ways. Research can be designed in ways that allow for it to be presented in ways that may speak to more people, expanding its reach and impact. Turning historical rhyming recipes into a digital narrative game is just one way to garner more interest from scholars and the public in recipes, history, and literature.

Special thanks to Dr. Anastasia Salter for all the knowledge imparted within their course on Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship.

The published version of the game can be played at https://madeofallwork.itch.io/.