Tag Archives: Culinary Recipes

Call for Editors: Social Media and Acquisitions

The Recipes Project is looking for new editors to grow our readership and expand the range of scholarship we feature on the blog. Are you a savvy Tweeter who loves the back-and-forth exchange of social media? Are you a regular reader with ideas about what you’d like to see us feature on the blog? Do you love thinking about recipes in all their myriad forms? Then you might make a great social media or acquisitions editor, and we would love to hear from you!

Editorial duties include:

Social Media Editors

  • Amplifying, sharing, and promoting writing on recipes, especially by underrepresented groups 
  • Running our social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion

Acquisitions Editors

  • Engaging with underrepresented groups and areas of study related to recipes, especially among underrepresented groups and non-Western societies
  • Connecting with and inviting potential contributors 
  • Organizing, editing, and uploading posts in rotation with other co-editors 
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion 

About Us

The Recipes Project is an interdisciplinary, volunteer organization. This work is the unpaid product of a community of passionate scholars of recipes.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds, including those engaged with the culinary arts, creative food writing, and academic research. We welcome scholars from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, comparative literature, classics, history, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology, and more. Graduate students are valued members of our community.  We particularly invite submissions from those from underrepresented groups and non-Western societies. 

The Recipes Project has an international reach that explores recipes of all kinds: medical, culinary, scientific, magical. Our posts cover a range of topics relating to historic cookbooks, instructions, ingredients, guidelines, and methods of cultivation and production across time and place. We value new writers and early career researchers, giving them a platform for new writing and supporting and amplifying their work. We have a broad audience—in 2021, we averaged 18,000 unique site visitors per month, and we have over 11.5K Twitter followers. We look forward to expanding further, with your help!

Application Details

To apply, please include a CV and one-page pitch describing what you wish to bring to the team. Acquisitions Editors: include two ideas for a month-long series and how you might expand our reach to new audiences. Social Media Editors: include two ideas for a week-long social media campaign that reaches distinct and diverse groups. Have other ideas? Send them our way! 

Please submit applications via email to recipesproject@brocku.ca. First review will begin on Feb. 1, 2022 and will continue until positions are filled.

Current Editorial Team

  • Clare Gordon Bettencourt
  • Jessica Clark
  • Amanda Herbert
  • R.A. Kashanipour
  • Sarah Peters Kernan
  • Melissa Reynolds
  • Joshua Schlachet
  • Miles Wilkerson

Around the Table: Bookseller Chat

This month on Around the Table, I am chatting with Don Lindgren, founder of Rabelais Inc., Fine Books on Food & Drink, located in Biddeford, Maine. Don has curated one of the largest selections of rare and out-of-print cookbooks in the United States at Rabelais, along with other food and drink materials including manuscripts, menus, prints, photographs, and other ephemera. Items sold at Rabelais date from the sixteenth century to the present.

Interior of Rabelais Books. Photo by Rabelais Inc.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat! First, could you tell us how you got involved in the antiquarian culinary book trade?

I started in working in bookshops while still in high school in the late 1970s. When I arrived at college, I sought a job in a bookshop and stumbled into the Chicago Powell’s (the original!) where I was “educated” in an excellent scholarly used and rare shop. For the next twenty years I plodded my way up the ladder of the antiquarian trade, but never dealing with culinary materials. My field was always modern thought, which included philosophy, psychology, social theory, etc., as well as modern art, design, and architecture. My more narrow specialty was historical avant-gardism and the little magazines. It wasn’t until my wife (at the time), Samantha Hoyt Lindgren, and I moved to Maine that the idea of food and drink as our specialty arose. Samantha was a pastry cook at the time; we put the books and food together, and voila!

You handle a wide range of books on food and drink. How do you acquire your inventory? Could you share any interesting places you have found books?

Champignons de l’Ain, a manuscript study of the mycology of the Rhone-Alpes region, with forty-nine original watercolors of mushrooms (circa 1870). Photo by Greta Rybus.

I am interested in any type of material that is part of the wider world of food and drink culture, that includes cookbooks, but also books on subjects like wild foods and foraging, distilling, the history of packaging, food art, etc. Not just printed books, but also manuscript cookery books, and ephemera of all sorts that is part of food culture (menus, trade cards, advertising art, trade catalogues, etc.). My inventory comes from all of the various sources booksellers use: online listings, auctions, book scouts, book fairs, other, non-specialized booksellers, etc. My preferred type of purchase is a large collection from a seasoned collector, which is where I am most likely to run across books I have never seen before. Great books can be found everywhere; I once purchased a number of rare Elizabethan cookbooks from a small dealer in the Catskills. The books had come out of a private home along with other, mostly unremarkable books. 

Tell us a bit about the sale of books at your shop. How do you develop relationships with your customers and how do you know what books to match to their needs, budget, etc.? How much of your business is with institutional collections compared to private collectors?

I love selling books in the shop, because I can have a real conversation with the client. And best of all I can put a special item in their hands and see them react to holding something that might be a true piece of history, or just react to the materiality of it. But only a small percentage of my sales (less than 5%) occur in the shop. And 10% cover all sales in the shop and through online listings. The other 90% is what I’d call private client business—clients who know us and we know them. It’s a small number of individuals and institutions (about 50/50 institutions to private collectors) that make up the bulk of the sales. I like selling to both, but not just because I need sales from both to keep the business going. Institutions buy a broader range of materials, looking for subject quality, specific collections, archives, and other materials that contain a wider historical narrative. 

Athenaeus Naucratites; Bedrott, Jakob. Athenaiou Deipnosophiston biblia pentekaideka. Athenaei Dipnosophistarvm, hoc est argute sciteque conuiuio disserentum. Lib. XV, quibus nunc quantum operae ac diligentiae adhibitum sit satis fiedei erit. Basileae: Joannes Valderus, 1535. Photo by Knack Factory.

What is your process for researching, cataloguing, and pricing your inventory?

By choice I am definitely a “scholarly bookseller” even though most people don’t think of cookery, or even food history, as a particularly scholarly subject. I have a very large library of food history reference materials (over 2000 volumes) and another library of reference books on bibliography and book history (about the same size) and I use the collections as well as online sources in my daily research. The degree of detail in my cataloguing depends on the nature of the item. A well-known book, even if rare, doesn’t necessarily need the level of detail required by a less famous, but unrecognized, work. My cataloguing of early community cookbooks, for example, is extremely detailed, as almost no one has given the genre the attention it deserves. Pricing is complex and depends a great deal on the type of book: How common is it in today’s marketplace? Does it have relevant auction records? And do I have a client in mind for it? Examples of my detailed cataloguing can be found in the linked pdfs in the next response.

What are some of your favorite items you have carried in Rabelais Books over the years?

Hmmm. A tough one… but here goes.

  • An immaculate copy of Irma Rombauer’s original self-published Joy of Cooking (1931), in a pristine dust jacket, likely the best copy in existence. 

Thank you, Don, for chatting about Rabelais and the antiquarian culinary book trade! You can find Rabelais Books on Facebook @RabelaisBooks and Instagram @rabelaisbooks. If you would like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.

A Modern Culinary Manuscript from Russia’s Ural Mountains

By Aleksandra Ippolitova

Everyday literacy and literate folklore from the twentieth century has for a long time been on the periphery of scholarly interest. One of the most widespread genres of everyday literacy is the culinary manuscript collection, but even this genre has attracted almost no attention thus far.

Sverdlovsk Oblast, where Verkhnee Dubrovo is located (Wiki Commons)
Sverdlovsk Oblast, where Verkhnee Dubrovo is located
(Wiki Commons)

In the late 1990s, I came across one such text in the home of a woman named Valentina Petrovna Ovchinnikova, who lives in the town of Verkhnee Dubrovo, some 35 km east of Ekaterinburg. The text was put together by Ovchinnikova’s mother, Maria Semenova Morozova, during the early twentieth century, in the years before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and gives a fascinating insight into the collection of culinary recipes in the modern period.

A Gift to Young Housewives  (kolovrat7520.ru)
A Gift to Young Housewives
(kolovrat7520.ru)

Many of the recipes in Morozova’s collection were copied from A Gift to Young Housewives [Podarok molodym khoziakam] by E. I. Molokhovets, a hugely popular printed recipe book in pre-Revolutionary Russia, with around 300,000 copies being printed between 1861 and 1917. The collection is not just a copy of the Molokhovets text, but also includes a number of recipes Morozova added herself. These additional recipes give us an insight into Morozova’s culinary interests: the majority of the additional recipes are for feast-day dishes, not everyday staples. It is also interesting that many of them seem unusual for village life: who would expect that biscuits would be a common dish in a village in the Urals?

Other aspects of the text give more of a local flavour: several recipes are named after people, very likely the people from whom Morozova had recieved the recipe. One such recipe is Admirer’s Cake [tort Bakhterki], from a local dialect word meaning “dear one” or “admirer.” Such dialect words are not used in the Molokhovets text, and are unlikely to be found in any printed work. Was this the nick-name of one of Morozova’s friends? Other recipes more obviously come from Morozova’s friends and family, like Tat’iana Ivanova’s Spicecakes and Dunia’s Lazy Cake. This use of social networks to acquire culinary recipes seems to have been common, as discussed by Alun Withey.

Morozova's Recipe Book (Aleksandra Ippolitova)
Morozova’s Recipe Book
(Aleksandra Ippolitova)

Interestingly, some of these recipes are very specific about when they should be made. The recipe for Petia’s Braga states:

“On Friday evening stew the hops, on Saturday morning boil half a pail of water, then add to the water 5 funt of sugar and 1 funt of yeast. Pour in the hops, and add a pail of cold water, 1/2 funt of cherries and 1/2 funt of honey. Put it on the stove, fasten it tightly closed, and on Sunday morning take it off the stove and it will be ready to drink in a week.”

Recipe for 'Petia's Braga' (Aleksandra Ippolitova)
Recipe for ‘Petia’s Braga’
(Aleksandra Ippolitova)

The Morozova text thus brings together traditions often seen as separate: printed works available across the country are put next to locally-collected recipes written in a dialect, big-city dishes appear in village life. Works such as that of Morozova help remind us of the importance of modern manuscripts: far from being a textual-historical dead-end, they were (and are) a central part of people’s everyday lives.

Translation by Clare Griffin.

This post is the fifth in this month’s series of posts on Russian recipes. Previous posts have introduced early modern Russia, told us how to feed our servants, how to get over hangovers, and how to heal foreigners.