Tag Archives: Libraries

American Studies, Education, Modern, Posts, Summer 2024, Teaching Resources

Teaching with Community Cookbooks

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By Jolie Braun
Increasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language,[1] women’s lives,[2] and African American history.[3] In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks. This method of studying the book as a physical object and cultural artifact can open up new avenues of discovery for students and spur different ways of thinking about authorship, publishing, and audience. In this context, community cookbooks are equal parts challenging and accessible, complex objects that offer students much to consider and discuss.

In Fall 2022, I taught a one-credit first year seminar, “More than Just Recipes: Exploring American Cookbooks,” based in the cookbook collection I steward as curator of modern literature and manuscripts at the Ohio State University Library’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library (RBML). I organized the course chronologically, beginning with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), known as America’s first cookbook, and ending with a recent collection of no-recipe recipes, Danny Licht’s Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again (2021). Each class period focused on a different topic, such as cookbooks and global foodways or advertising cookbooks. The first part of a session was a combination of lecture and discussion. During the latter half, students worked directly with materials from RBML’s holdings.

Community cookbooks work well for hands-on analysis. Produced by small, amateur groups outside of traditional publishing channels, these books deviate from their mainstream counterparts in significant ways. This is evident inside and out: for example, they are often bound with inexpensive, comb binding, lack images of finished dishes, and frequently include duplicate recipes. The creators, resources, and motives involved in producing community cookbooks are vastly different from mainstream cookbooks and the tangible evidence of these differences can lead to a fruitful discussion about expectations and conventions of the genre. 

For our class session on community cookbooks, I selected several published in Ohio between the 1960s and the 1990s, including a mix of cookbooks printed by cookbook publishers—an option that became increasingly popular during the late twentieth century—as well as books that had been produced largely by the groups themselves.

A few Ohio community cookbooks used in this class session. Image credit: Jolie Braun

Working in pairs, students chose a book from the selection and used a handout I created with questions to guide their study. They began by recording bibliographic information about their book, a task that prompted them to locate these details and consider the context they provided. With community cookbooks, this seemingly simple task can present challenges: Who is the author? When and where was it published? During our class discussion, we talked about why such details may not have been considered necessary to include in self-published works created by a collective and intended for a local audience.

Students also wrote a physical description of their cookbook. How was it made, what materials were used, and what could that reveal? Some were bound together with metal rings or had covers made out of scrap cardstock, familiar materials used in unconventional ways that suggested both the limitations and resourcefulness of their creators. These descriptions were an opportunity to encourage students to think about how a book represents a series of choices and what decisions they might make if creating a book of their own.  

Lastly, students reviewed the contents of their book, chose an unfamiliar recipe to research, and reported their findings to the class. Their selections—such as applesauce meatloaf and sock it to me cake—were representative of home cooking, and led to a conversation about the nature of foods found in community cookbooks and what they could tell us about how people ate and the group that compiled the cookbook.

Community cookbooks can be eye-opening for students. My class was surprised and excited to encounter cookbooks that were not the work of chefs or cooks or writers, but of ordinary people.

[1] Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite, “Books That Cook: Teaching Food and Food Literature in the English Classroom,” College English, 70.4 (2008): 421-436.

[2] Kathryn G. Matheny, “No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21.2 (2020): 79-97. https://rbm.acrl.org/index.php/rbm/article/view/24707/32534

[3] Sakina M. Hughes, “Teaching African American History and Culture through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, 42.2 (2017): 59-72.

Jolie Braun is the Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she manages and develops the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include teaching and outreach in special collections, self-publishing, cookbooks, and zines. Her co-curated exhibit, Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History, runs from August 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025 in the Thompson Library gallery.

Libraries, Archives & Museums, Manuscripts, Research and Writing

The Wellcome Library’s Manuscript Recipe Books: Reflections on a Quarter-century of Collecting

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By Richard Aspin

Page from Lady Ayscough’s book of ‘Receits of phisick and chirurgery’, dated 1692, the first recorded acquisition for Henry Welcome’s library in 1897 (Wellcome Western MS.1026)

Manuscript recipe books were at the forefront of Henry Wellcome’s collecting activities. Perhaps no other genre of European written artefact spoke more directly to his conception of healthcare as the fundamental preoccupation of human beings. Indeed his first recorded Library acquisition in 1897 was a late 17th-century English manuscript recipe book. At the time of Wellcome’s death in 1936 there were probably between 150 and 200 such books in the collection, depending on how they are defined. Thirty of so of these came from the cookery book collection of John Hodgkin of Reading (1857-1930), purchased at Hodgson’s auctioneers in London in April 1931.

Acquisition of recipe books fell away after 1936, in line with overall retrenchment in the development of the collections; but it is probable that this genre of manuscript suffered disproportionately as the focus of the postwar Wellcome Library and later Institute was firmly directed towards the history of scientific medicine and professional practice. Not more than a dozen manuscript recipe books were acquired between 1936 and 1986. There was no obvious scholarly interest in the history of domestic medicine, and it was not even clear that cookery was a relevant subject for a medical library.

This was the position of the field when I came into post as curator of western manuscripts in 1991. I occasionally purchased manuscript recipe books for the Wellcome collection over the coming years – we had a generous acquisitions allowance and manuscripts of this type were fairly inexpensive – but I had little sense of developing an important research resource. The standout acquisition of the nineties, Lady Ann Fanshawe’s book (MS.7113), which has recently been the subject of a popular monograph[1], was purchased as much for its associational and provenance interest as its content, and the hammer price at auction of £2800 in 1995 (equivalent to just over £5000 today), which now seems nugatory, was deemed somewhat extravagant at the time. When cataloguing recipe books we more or less followed the pattern set by S.A.J. Moorat, who after the war had catalogued the items acquired in Henry Wellcome’s time: scant attention was paid to the nature and content of the recipes beyond a broad indication of whether they were medicinal or culinary.

Little did I know that the growth of research interest in this genre of manuscript was already well under way, and not just in the productions of one or two ladies-bountiful, but in the wider practice of recipe-making and taking among the middling sort in early modern England. How I slowly became aware of this is now difficult to reconstruct: certainly it had nothing to do with proximity to the Wellcome Institute academic history of medicine department, where there seemed to be very little interest in recipes. It was probably largely owing to the growing number of researchers consulting our recipe books in the Wellcome Library, often Americans, and often coming from a literary studies rather than a medical history background.

The phenomenon was sufficiently salient to lead me to propose a seminar series on recipes to the academic department’s programme committee, which duly took place in autumn 2002, and led in due course to the formation of the Medicinal Receipts Research Group the following year. In the meantime the evident research interest in recipes stimulated increased collecting activity, such that well over a hundred additional English manuscript recipe books have entered the collection over the past twenty-five years. Many more could have been added: indeed, along with the growing realisation of the research value of these books has been a recognition of just how ubiquitous this genre of manuscript must have been among the literate population of early modern England.

The growing research interest in recipe books was marked by the microfilming of a substantial proportion of our collection by Thomson Gale in 2003[2], albeit framed within a now rather anachronistic-looking women’s history paradigm. Later, the seventeenth-century books – some seventy or so volumes – were digitised and their contents selectively indexed, so that individual recipe headings could be searched on-line. It was becoming clear that in addition to the evident interest of one or two standout recipe books such as the Fanshawe volume, the generality of books

Remedy for the plague from Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipe book, mid 17th cent (Wellcome Western MS.7113)

formed in aggregate a substantial research resource that could be used by scholars to illuminate questions such as the circulation of recipes, the relationship between domestic and elite medicine, and the use of exotic drugs.

Paradoxically the prices realised on the open market have not reflected the increased availability of manuscripts for purchase; if in the 1990s we could buy a solid if unremarkable late-seventeenth or eighteenth century recipe book for £350 or £400, this had increased at least tenfold by 2017. Such an exponential price rise almost certainly implies vigorous activity by a new generation of collectors building twenty-first century equivalents of the John Hodgkin cookery book collection. I am not aware of any other public collection in the UK that targets recipe books as a genre of manuscript. The price rise almost certainly means that the period of ‘heroic’ collecting of recipe manuscripts by Wellcome has come to an end. Henceforth acquisitions – of which there seems to be no sign of a diminishing supply – will no doubt be highly selective. In short, the Wellcome’s collection is to all intents and purposes complete.

Richard Aspin was curator of western manuscripts and later head of special collections in the Wellcome Library from 1991 to 2016. He took a leading part in developing the Library’s research collections during that time, including the Wellcome’s unrivalled range of early modern domestic recipe manuscripts, which are today the most-frequently consulted pre-twentieth century manuscript materials in the library. His investigation of the links between two seventeenth-century recipe manuscripts in the collection was published as ‘Who was Elizabeth Okeover?’, in Medical History, 2000, 44: 531-540

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[1] Lucy Moore, Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine (2017)

[2] Women and medicine : remedy books, 1533-1865 : from the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London, ed. Sara Pennell (2004)

 

Early Modern, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Manuscripts, Medicine, Series: Distillation, Students, Teaching Resources

Teaching Recipes in the Wangensteen Library

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By Emily Beck

Over the course of my graduate career at the University of Minnesota, I’ve become interested in the ways that libraries function as spaces for both academic and public teaching. I began using recipe books with undergraduate classes in the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine simply because I find them interesting. It has become evident, however, that they are powerful teaching tools for both students and the public: recipe books resonate with viewers because they are personal and relatable.

Medical Receipt Book, Mary Pewe, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, WZ250 M489 1637
Medical Receipt Book, Mary Pewe, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, WZ250 M489 1637

I have used the Wangensteen’s recipe book collection for teaching undergraduate History of Medicine courses. The students in these classes are typically pre-health sciences majors and are implicitly interested in healthcare, but have not often considered the history of their chosen careers. Viewing a medical recipe book gives them opportunities to get closer to historical specifics, considering individuals rather than professions. For example, using an English manuscript from 1637 that is easy to read and quite large, I encourage students to reflect on the variety of illnesses and methods of treatment in the volume. By thinking about individual medical practice and health experience, students are able to more clearly grasp how humoral theory was applied on a day-to-day basis.

The Wangensteen at the Science Museum of MInnesota
The Wangensteen at the Science Museum of Minnesota, Image courtesy of Bonnie Gidzak

In addition to academic teaching and research, the Wangensteen creates exhibits with collection materials to teach the public about various aspects of the history of medicine. As I began developing the Wangensteen’s next exhibit, Bodies and Spirits: Health and the History of Fermentation and Distillation (September 2015-May 2016), it was clear that recipe books were an obvious choice for the display cases. They show how historical individuals frequently made fermented and distilled products, like beer and wine, and used them as medicines. In April 2015, we were invited to participate in an event on fermentation at the Science Museum of Minnesota to give a preview of the exhibit. We were the only historically focused exhibitor at this event with several thousand attendees, so standing out was imperative. We brought facsimile copies of several recipe books as well as postcards with a historical brewing recipe. The recipes captivated the attendees because they could compare them to their own home-brewing and fermenting experiences. Using recipes with this audience was an easy way to initiate discussion about the complex origins of some of the fermented products that they enjoy at home.

When the exhibit opens in September, we will use manuscript recipe books to teach our audience how closely aligned health and alcohol were in earlier time periods. These will also demonstrate how individuals were expected to undertake their production at home. We are in conversation with a local restaurant about making some of the fermented vegetables and drinks out of these manuscripts. I hope to have a tasting event where we can invite the public and the university community to try these foods while thinking about the historical rationale for making fermented products. We’re looking forward to a year of public programming around recipes as well as continuing to teach courses using recipe books.