Tag Archives: cookbooks

What were we eating? Salmon, seafood, and the diet of fishing and canning communities in British Columbia’s Salmonopolis

By Tatyana Beck, with content adapted from Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, a Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society publication

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fishing and salmon canning industries on the West Coast of British Columbia (BC) were powered by a diverse workforce of Indigenous communities, European settlers, and international labourers primarily hailing from Japan and China. This multicultural working community was in turn powered by salmon.

The communities that fished the Fraser River and laboured for the expanding number of canneries along the BC coast were operating in the province at a time when Pacific salmon was particularly abundant, fresh, and accessible. The canneries along the Coast, which opened as early as the 1870s, were built at the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had access  to a seemingly endless supply of fat, fully-grown salmon as the fish made their way from the ocean towards their freshwater spawning grounds each summer and autumn.

Chum salmon awaiting processing, Leonard Frank Photography. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G1996.006.002/8

Known colloquially as “Salmonopolis”, the village of Steveston, BC was a major player within the history of these industries. By 1890, Steveston was home to a total of 15 operating canneries,the largest of which was the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. For the communities living and working in Steveston, fish and seafood weren’t just a job – they were inseparable from the sights, smells, and taste of everyday life.

In Steveston, like the rest of the Coast, the first cannery workers came from the local Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups were the first fishers of the Fraser River, as well as the original knowledge-keepers who taught European settlers how to find and fish Pacific salmon. Traditional Indigenous fishing focused on collecting enough fish to feed community members during the spring and summer, and to be smoked, dried, or candied for winter preservation or seasonal trade. 

Fishers taking a lunch break on the dock. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2003.033.004.

The arrival of European businessmen to Steveston, alongside the newly-invented process of commercial canning, brought rapid change. The industry grew, and cannery work attracted labourers from around the world. Along the West Coast, the Japanese community had a significant presence and brought tremendous fishing expertise with them. Chinese labourers, some already in BC to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, supplied seasonal labour in a variety of manual positions. Together with a range of European immigrant communities and early Indigenous workers, these communities formed the workforce that helped the business of salmon canning and exporting flourish. The Fraser River’s abundant marine populations became an economic tool, exported by sea to buyers primarily in England.

But wait: if the hundreds of thousands of cans of salmon that the canneries produced were being sent across the world to England, then how was salmon the food that powered the Cannery’s workforce? What, exactly, were they eating?

Cannery can loft stacked with thousands of cans waiting to be filled with salmon. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2002.003.001.

In 20th century Steveston the reality was this: when the river has a seemingly never-ending supply, even the canneries might turn away your catch. Even after selling what the canneries rejected, leaving gifts for your friends and neighbours, and stocking your pantry with self-canned product for the winters, there would still be more fish waiting for you to use. If you were a fisher, docked for the night and in need of dinner, what would’ve been simpler than taking a fish right out of your boat to whip something up for you and your crew? With such abundance, Steveston residents would make use of whatever leftover fish they had on hand, adapting traditional recipes to fit with the resources the River had given them.

There was one notable exception: Indigenous communities, who had been the earliest workers at many West Coast canneries, were soon heavily policed and restricted from partaking in traditional fishing practices or accessing salmon for their communities in favour of those very same canneries.

At the canneries, seasonal workers typically lived in bunkhouses segregated by race and gender, or in communal housing with a contracted cook supplying meals. Supplies often included the national foods of the workers, such as salted eggs, bean cakes, and bamboo shoots for Chinese bunkhouses. This community would certainly have made use of fresh or canned local fish in addition to the pork and chicken they were supplied. 

Commercial fisherman Butch Sakiyama remembers bringing the fish he’d caught that the canneries had rejected to the bunkhouses to be turned into meals for himself and the other fishers : “[…] the ladies would cut it up, salt it or cook it, and the next day, next thing you know they got teriyaki salmon. And the ladies would go up there and grow their own veggies, […] and have meals ready for us”.

With diverse communities working and living in such close proximity, there were opportunities not only to adapt one’s own cultural recipes, but to learn and share recipes with one another. Commercial fisher and Coast Salish/Sahtu-Dené cultural worker Rosemary Georgeson recounts how she and her father shared jibu, a seafood hot pot, with Japanese-Canadian fishers they encountered one night after she gave them some of the fillets from her family’s boat. “[…] they bring me and dad over and they start making this sauce on the grill, adding in slivered onions and carrots, and then the slivered fish. We ate together and they spent about two hours talking with my dad.”

Cover, Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present

The Gorgeson’s story is just one of the many tales included in the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site’s Fish Tales feature exhibit (2023-2025), which explored coastal BC residents’ deep ties to fish and seafood as a dietary staple, source of community connection, and a way of life. The legacy project created from this exhibit, the newly-published Cannery community recipe book Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present collects the “fish tales” shared by Steveston’s present community members, fishing communities, and museum audiences and connects them to the past experiences, interviews, recipes, and eating traditions of Steveston’s past.

Credit: pp. 44-45; Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, Copyright 2025, Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.

This article is only a taste of what can be found in the Society’s new publication. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is now available at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site in Steveston, BC, or through our online gift shop at https://thecannerystore.square.site/s/shop


References: 

Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2026.

The Monster Cannery: The History of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2011.


Tatyana Beck is a heritage and cultural resource management professional and current Curatorial Program Manager at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. With over five years of experience in museum programming and interpretive writing and many more in cultural and event work, Tatyana finds joy in using storytelling to create connection and bring new and hidden perspectives to audiences of all ages. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is her first official publication.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society honours the importance of Canada’s West Coast fishing history by sharing stories of the fishing industry and fishing communities through exhibitions, collections, programs, and events. In addition to operating the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, the Society works to achieve its mission through other activities such as creating annual feature exhibitions related to fishing history and producing community events. www.gulfofgeorgiacannery.org 

 

Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique

By Kathleen Sheldon

 In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, after a decade-long liberation struggle. But neighboring South Africa, then under the white-supremacist apartheid regime, funded and supplied weapons to organizations that were anti-socialist or otherwise opposed to Mozambique’s government. By the early 1980s conditions deteriorated as that internal war expanded.[i] Beira, the port city where we lived, suffered from repeated electrical power losses due to sabotage and increasing problems in obtaining food. Devastation in the country as a whole was extreme.[ii]

A colourful book cover of the author's memoir
Fig. 1. Cover of The Mackerel Years, the memoir by the author.

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Access to food was problematic. Most of the shops posted signs in their windows warning, “There is no salt, meat, bread,” sometimes listing a dozen items that were not available. We marveled at the rows of empty shelves, as even so-called supermarkets had only half a shelf of rough gray toilet paper and nothing else. The open-air markets displayed little or no fresh items. If tomatoes or oranges arrived at a shop, boisterous lines would materialize, and the food would quickly run out. The local dollar shop, where we could use foreign currency to buy imported items, had very limited supplies, though we appreciated delicacies like Hero jam from Switzerland. Even Spam, which we had avoided at home in the U.S., proved to be a tasty treat.

When we first arrived, we noticed that a tea shop on the ground floor of our five-story apartment building was closed and dark, though tables and chairs were visible inside. As we stopped to peer through the large dirty windows, a friend told us, “This shop used to serve nice little rolls and tea, up until a few months ago.” “Oh good,” I responded optimistically, “Maybe we’ll be able to buy some bread here.” The tea shop never opened while we were there, though it did occasionally act as a bakery and sell bread rolls, with people lining up around the block to buy a bagful.

I eventually discovered a recipe for a quick-rising yeast bread in a small pamphlet that I had brought from home, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls from the Culinary Arts Institute.[iii]

A loaf cake sites on a yellow platter topped with glazed fruit.
Fig. 2. Cover of 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession.

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Casserole Bread Batter Method

1 cup milk

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons shortening

1 cup warm (not hot) water

2 packages or cakes yeast, active dry or compressed

4½ cups sifted flour

Scald milk; stir in sugar, salt and shortening. Cool to lukewarm. Measure the warm water into a bowl. (Use lukewarm water for compressed yeast). Sprinkle or crumble in the yeast. Stir until softened. Blend in the lukewarm milk mixture. Add flour and stir until well blended, about 2 minutes. Cover; let rise in warm place free from drafts about 40 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Stir batter down. Beat vigorously about ½ minute. Turn into greased 1½-quart casserole. An 8x8x2-inch square pan may be used. Bake uncovered at 375o F. about 1 hour. Makes 1 loaf.

A page of text includes recipes for various breads with yeast, with an accompanying image of bread
Fig. 3. Recipe page from 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession. Original publisher no longer exists and cannot be contacted for permission.

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Since it could be baked in an eight-inch square pan, I could use our 220-volt toaster oven that we had purchased in Los Angeles before leaving, which was more reliable than the propane gas oven installed in the kitchen. I developed a routine to fit the bread-baking into the on-and-off pattern of our electric power. When the power came on, I would immediately mix up a batch of dough, which then needed less than an hour to rise before baking. I would then beat it down, put it into the pan, and get it into the oven while we still had electricity. Even if we only had three or four hours of power every other day, I could make enough bread to last us for two or three days.

The other constraint was the erratic supply of flour. Once or twice my husband’s co-workers arranged to buy fifty-kilogram sacks and divide the flour among our group. Getting milk was also a group endeavor. We bought it in bulk through a special arrangement from a local dairy. It was delivered to our building in ten-gallon metal milk cans, shared out among our friends, and then we each boiled our share before using it.

That bread became a staple part of our diet. We usually ate it for breakfast, sliced in small squares and spread with White Rhino peanut butter that friends brought back from shopping trips to Zimbabwe or South Africa.

A white rhinoceros features in the center of black text with a red border.
Fig. 4. Label from White Rhino peanut butter, ca. 1983, in author’s possession. Image credit: Kathleen Sheldon.

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In more recent years when I met with a group of friends to discuss a draft of my memoir, one of them baked this bread for our gathering. Baking that bread during the difficult years of living with conflict had felt like a clever, necessary accomplishment, and I had not made it myself since our return to the U.S. My friend’s offering was the first time I had eaten it in forty years, and it was still a good sturdy bread that tasted wonderful with butter and peanut butter.

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[i] Two sources that focus on that conflict are: William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War Against the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

[ii] I have written about that experience in The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique. This essay shares one story about how we coped.

[iii] Culinary Arts Institute, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1965). It is out of print, but available at Amazon and EBay. For more information on Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, see Terri Griffith’s blog, 250 Potato Possibilities.


Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar of African women’s history. Her previous books include African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002), and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2d ed. (2016). She has also published dozens of articles in journals and edited collections and contributed as an author and editor to many reference works. She has just completed ten years on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. She is a founding editor of H-Luso-Africa, an online network about Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.

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.