Tag Archives: pedagogy

Teaching Grandma Peg’s Recipes

By Jennifer Cognard-Black

We begin with recipes. On day one of my “Books that Cook” class—an upper-level seminar on the literatures of food in which we study novels, memoirs, and films with recipes—I pass out pens and index cards and ask my students to jot down a recipe they know by heart. To assure those who don’t identify as cooks, I tell them that if they know how to make, say, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a cheese quesadilla, that counts as a recipe.

Students then swap their cards and examine their peer’s recipe. We start by thinking like rhetoricians, talking about the rhetorical form of modern recipes, meaning their components (title, ingredients, and instructions) and why they’re structured in this way, linking form to function.

From there, I talk about the history of this genre in North America—from oral traditions to commonplace books to cookbooks and the rise of nutritionism and level measurement—before suggesting something that I’ve written about in Melissa Goldthwaite’s anthology Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics: that recipes are embodied stories.

Considering recipes as stories leads us to think like anthropologists, examining our recipes as artifacts of culinary cultures—ones that reveal familial, ethnic, religious, economic, and agricultural traditions and values. We also discuss how recipes produce bodies: the writer’s, of course, but also ancestral and future bodies and even the reader’s body should they make the dish. As Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster argue so well in The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, “The recipe. . .[puts] the reader in contact with the writer, making personal connections with a cultural moment or a community, and allowing the reader to interpolate [themselves] into the text, making the narrative [their] own.”

Importantly, though, we also discuss how recipes can exclude as well as include, coding certain bodies as other and/or usurping aspects of someone else’s culinary culture without giving them credit. In the U.S., that might mean erasing the origins of recipes, as has happened repeatedly to Black women who, as Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her book The Jemima Code, “did much of the cooking in early American kitchens.” Similar erasures and exclusions have occurred with recipes first developed by Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian communities.     

In every food-based class I teach, I encourage learning that’s sensory, creative, and collaborative. And so I do the assignments alongside my students, including this exercise. For the recipe I know by heart, I use my paternal grandmother’s for banana bread—one she snail-mailed to me when I was a graduate student, suggesting I could save money by repurposing blackened bananas into a “Delicious Treat!”

Many of my best-beloved recipes come from this grandmother, Nellie “Peg” Cognard. When Peg died in 2004 at the age of 89, my father asked if I wanted anything of hers. Immediately I said, “her recipe box”—which is actually a 1970s index-card organizer, 14 inches long and missing a lid. This unassuming container holds around 1400 recipe cards, spattered with grease and mostly written in my grandmother’s hand: an archive of her cooking culture, particularly among her fellow homemakers in Omaha, Nebraska. These recipe cards range from the 1940s through the mid-80s, when my Grandma and Grandpa Cognard moved to Texas, far from brisk Nebraska winters.

Grandma Peg’s 1400 recipes are for mid-century midwestern delicacies such as Ham Loaf, Hamburger Pie, Butterhorn Rolls, Waldorf Astoria Salad, Dump Cake, Milky Way Cake, and my father’s favorite, Toll House Cookies with Oatmeal.

Fig. 1. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.
Fig. 2. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

On the second day of “Books that Cook,” I bring in loaves of Grandma Peg’s banana bread along with the entire “Desserts” section of her recipe box. As I hand out fistfuls of cards, I tell them that, today, we’re going to think like historians.

The first thing students notice is the handwriting, a slanting cursive with looping O’s and tight S’s. They enjoy the tactility: the bodily trace of Grandma Peg as their thumbs brush over her words—which is part of what turns such functional texts into heirlooms.

Then they notice the names. While my grandmother made all these dishes herself, she gave other cooks their due, writing their name in the corner. Most recipes came to my grandma by way of friends in her United Methodist women’s group—including her closest friend Gen May—or from family members, such as her daughter Shirley or my mother Anne. This practice of attribution underscores the collaborative nature of my grandma’s cooking circle, while also building an archive of communal knowledge.

Fig. 3. Recipe Attributions. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

Students are also struck by the distinct modalities of the cards, which reveal how twentieth-century American cooking was influenced by the rise of consumer culture—in everything from the abundance and branding of processed foods (e.g., Angel-flake coconut) to the personalized recipe cards. They also note profound shifts in communication technologies, with some recipes plunked out on a typewriter and others cut-and-pasted from newspapers or magazines.

Fig. 4. Recipe Card Modalities. Image Credit: Personal Collection

What becomes clear through our historical analysis is that these stay-at-home women forged a kind of amateur professionalism as home cooks. Their recipe exchanges gave them agency, community, and sometimes celebrity; a woman could build a reputation on her perfect ice-box cakes.

As our conclusion to this work—and to set up future class discussions—I then bring out some of Grandma Peg’s recipe cards from beyond the “Desserts” section, including ones for Oriental Tuna Salad, Old Virginia Peanut Soup, Taiwanese Special, Dead Bread (“Pan de Muerto”), and Poor Man’s Liver Paté. Why? Because my grandmother’s recipes are products of the politics, economy, and social hierarchies of her day, and ephemera such as handwritten recipes record it all: not just how food can create belonging, but how culinary cultures can appropriate and exclude as well. As Abby M. Dubisar puts it in her article on “Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity,” through cookbooks—but also through caches of handwritten recipes—“white stories about race and class and food…are maintained.”

Fig. 5. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection
Fig. 6. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection

Beginning my “Books that Cook” classes with this personal recipe collection accomplishes a number of pedagogical goals. It asks students to think critically through distinct disciplinary lenses. It also asks them to think with their bodies as they touch and taste history, handling these cards and eating a slice of Grandma Peg’s banana bread. And, finally, it asks that they consider the complexity of cooking communities in light of identity and inequality.

At the end of our first week, I ask everyone to take their peer’s recipe home and turn it into the page of a cookbook using old-school tools: pens and markers, tape and glue. By week two, these pages become a class cookbook zine. I scan their pages and add a cover, epigraph, and table of contents before making hard copies for everyone—which accomplishes yet another pedagogical goal (and perhaps the one that’s most important to me): starting our own culinary community.


Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college fastened to a shore in Southern Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia and the Netherlands, she received the 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, considered the “Nobel Prize” for teachers. Jennifer is the author or co-editor of six books, including Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014) and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (NYUP 2024), both with her long-time collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Jennifer also publishes essays and short fiction, and she’s produced various lecture series for The Great Courses and Audible, including an Audible Original titled “Books that Cook: Food & Fiction” (2021).

Recipes as Pedagogical Resistance: Teaching Food Writing in an AI-Era

By Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers 

As college professors with three combined decades of First-Year Writing experience, we’re observing two unsettling trends: first, that traditional undergraduate students are increasingly unlikely to tackle academic writing without relying on AI-tools, and second, that they are increasingly likely to hold rigid beliefs about writing—what it is, what it can do, and what it should sound and look like. As a result, we’re noting a third phenomenon: in the face of machine-generated content, students don’t trust their own voices.  

And why should they? As products of an educational system that standardizes and quantifies learning, it makes sense that many students view writing as an output—one to be assessed through binary lenses of good/bad, right/wrong.  

Enter generative-AI, which capitalizes on learned beliefs that “good” academic writing conforms to a prescribed formula and that the goal of writing is not to learn, but to efficiently produce the “right” answer in service of a grade. But writing is much like cooking; the process is vital to the product. Both writing and cooking are iterative and messy; words, like ingredients, often refuse to come together. They demand patience, humility, and the willingness to make mistakes. And, as any experienced cook knows, the courage to deviate from the recipe’s formula, and to defy its discursive authority in favor of our own instincts.  

But let us not forget, the recipe is a technology, and one not unlike gen-AI. Derived from the Latin imperative “recipere,” meaning “to take or receive,” the word “recipe” dates back at least to the fourteenth century and was used by alchemists and domestic cooks to denote not a finished text but a “method of preparation,” or steps that, if followed, promised reliable outcomes (Notaker 144, 146-7). However, despite its steady move towards discursive efficiency and culinary standardization in the hands of nineteenth-century British writers Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton, recipes, unlike gen-AI, have always recorded the personal, the human, and even the body itself. As Kyla Tompkins puts it, beneath a recipe lies “a field of embodied knowledges, movements, flavors, smells, gestures, and habits that is only hinted at by [the recipe’s] own textual remains” (442). From kitchens in early modern British households to college classrooms, recipes, as technology, have the power to do what gen-AI cannot: “register the creative, intellectual, and social exchanges . . . of people trying to make sense of their worlds” (Wendy Wall xii). 

And so, to our students’ surprise, we tasked them with writing a mini-cookbook for their first college writing assignment. As we explain in the prompt, “Like cookbooks themselves, ‘we contain multitudes’ (Ferguson 33). We are human beings; our identities are many, and our food traditions and tastes are shaped by these identities.” To complete the project, students sourced three recipes reflective of different intersections of their identities. Collected recipes became personal narrative once surrounded by carefully-curated paratexts: treasured family photos, marginal notes, recipe annotations, personal anecdotes. (For Jolie Braun’s experience teaching with community cookbooks, see her post here.)

Recipe Entry, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queen’s University of Charlotte student (image included with permission.)

To prepare, we studied the historical evolution of the cookbook. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859) taught us that standardizing the recipe form played a key role in the historical construction of white, middle-class femininity. Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee (2019), on the other hand, uses the recipe as record, reclaiming African foodways erased by the slave trade.  

Inspired by these examples and others such as Vertamae Smart-Grosvener’s Vibration Cooking (1970), students did so much more than collect recipes; they wrote to understand themselves. Their collections centered beloved family traditions such as tailgating, commemorated lost loved ones, confronted traumatic memories of disordered eating, and recorded holiday traditions that bridged linguistic and geographic homeplaces. 

Cover, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queens University of Charlotte (image included with permission).

Writing about food invited students to discover and negotiate the complicated, sometimes painful, and sometimes joyful intersections between food, one’s past, and who one wishes to become; to legitimize and honor memories, emotions, cultural heritages, languages of origin, and embodied knowledges at risk of being lost.  

This is writing gen-AI cannot manufacture. Indeed, as one student put it: 

My favorite part of this assignment was being able to express myself in a way I had never experienced. Linking food to myself, and the various aspects of my identity or memories opened my mind to different ways people can express themselves. The only genuine struggle I had within this was overcoming the heavy emotions that I was trying to convey. At first, I experienced an emotional block, in which all my emotions related to the assignment seemed non-existent. This obviously limited the vulnerable aspect of my cookbook I have grown much pride in. The project has truly been a joy to complete, and I would gladly do it again. 

AI- writing erases linguistic differences and generates composite knowledge in service of expedience and transaction. Cookbook-writing, in contrast, opens space for abundance by resisting dominant literacies. In joining this tradition, students learned to recognize writing as a vital act—of remembering, of re-claiming, of resistance. 


Bonnie Shishko is Assistant Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and First-Year Writing. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and food in Victorian and contemporary women’s writing. Her work on recipes and their history has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Victorians Institute Journal, the edited collections Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays (Edinburgh University Press) and Teaching Food in Literature (MLA Press), as well as Journal of Victorian Culture Online and The Recipes Project. She enjoys all things pickled and discovering new ways to make the tastiest tomato sandwich.   

Shawn Bowers is Associate Professor at Queens University of Charlotte where she teaches courses on creative writing, Latinx literature, and First-Year Writing and currently serves as the director of General Education for the university. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens. Under the pen name Anita Cantillo, Shawn has published poetry in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Juke Joint, Blue Mesa Review, and Azahares, among other journals. Her favorite food is tamales from her beloved homeland of Costa Rica.  


Works Cited

Beeton, Isabella. Book of Household Management. London: S.O. Beeton, 1861. 

Kelly, Rhea. “Survey: 86% of Students Already Use AI in Their Studies.” Campus Technology. 28, (2024): https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/28/survey-86-of-students-already-use-ai-in-their-studies.aspx.  

Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: from Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geeche Girl. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970.  

Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2019. 

Tompkins, Kyla. “Consider the Recipe.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 1,2 (2013): 439-445. 

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.  

Historic Recipes as Sources: A Special Series

By Amanda Moniz

Historians are currently engaged in a project of learning to use food as a source and as a medium for the study of history.  Long an aspect of historic sites’ programs, the history of food and eating is increasingly attracting the interest of historians working in a broad range of institutions.  Museums, such as the National Museum of American History, now feature exhibits and events about food history.  More and more scholars are studying the production, consumption, and meaning of food in various times and places.  Blog, journals and listservs are examining the topic.  Elementary, secondary, and college educators are integrating the history of food into their curricula.  Meanwhile, with interest in the history of sensory experiences burgeoning more generally, scholars are experimenting with making and eating recipes as part of the study of the history of food.  This special series examines some of the issues this endeavor raises.

eggs

Food is appealing and accessible as a means for studying the past.  As the posts in this series explore, that accessibility encourages scholars to address familiar questions about interrogating sources in distinct ways.  Alma Igra, recipient of a “History in Action” grant from the American Historical Association-Mellon Career Diversity Pilot Program for the Leftovers project, reflects on the tension between necessarily bringing her experience as a cook to historic recipes and faithfully recovering those recipes.  Comparing two early-modern rice pudding recipes, along with the larger history of global trade and labor they reveal, Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicosia of Cooking in the Archives consider how historic recipes allow us to approach, though never fully reach, an appreciation of palates in the past.  David S. Shields, a leader in both the field of American food history and the repatriation of historic American foods, examines the unusual nature of American bitters, probing recipes for their insights into cultural preoccupations.

As these authors so insightfully discuss, making and eating historic foods raises questions experientially about cookbooks, recipes, and ingredients as sources.  The nature of cooking and eating, along with practical considerations, also fosters more collaboration among scholars and in historic foodways projects than in historians’ typical work, as the various endeavors of the scholars in this series show.  Much as the musical Hamilton innovatively explains historians’ reliance on an incomplete record to craft historical narratives, historic cookery similarly offers scholars’ opportunities to work with one another and with students and broader publics to grapple with the making of history.  We invite you to join our exploration of food as source and medium for studying the past and welcome your thoughts.

Amanda Moniz is assistant director of the National History Center and Program Coordinator at the American Historical Association.  A former pastry chef, she pursues public history projects about food.

Transcription-as-collaboration

In a recent class session of my graduate seminar, “Thinking Green: Eco-Approaches to Texts,” my students and I transcribed and discussed at length the first recipe that appears in a manuscript book in the Wellcome Medical Library: MS 213, “A Booke of diuers Medecines, Broothes, Salues, Waters, Syroppes and Oyntementes of which many or the most part haue been experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs Corlyon. Anno Domini 1606.”

www.plantlife.org.uk
Wild daisies
www.plantlife.org.uk

To do this, we worked with the first recipe in the book, “A Medecine for a Pinn and a Webb or any other soore Eye,” which instructs as follows:

Take one handfull of three leaued grasse that is
most spotted with white: Gather it close to the roote,
as much of wilde Dasye rootes: Stampe them all in a
woodden dishe, and boyle them in one pinte of water, in
a clean brasse skillet with a very soft fyer. When
it is scommed putt in so much Allome as will make the
water tast roughe uppon your tounge. After putt in so
much honny as will make it Looke yeollowe and taste
very sweete. When it hath boyled a pretty while and is
cleane scommed, straine it into a cleane vessell, and
when it is colde poure the clearest into a glasse and
keepe it in a colde place, and it will last three weekes
in Winter and 14. Dayes in the Sommer: The water is to
be applied to the Eyes one hower before they aryse and when
they goe to bedd. If the Eye be very soore dresse it at two of the
clocke in the after noone, and sleepe after it, if they cann.

We then worked together on a (deceptively) simple question: “Who/what seems to have agency in this recipe, and what is the source of authority?” What followed was a 2-1/2 hour collaboration that I would say is at the heart of what I hope recipe transcription can do in our classrooms and central to how I think recipes work.

We began, well, at the beginning. Students turned to the title of the book, a collection of that which had been “experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs Corlyon.” As such, authority lies in the tried and tested text itself, evidenced too by claims of “probatum” throughout these books. As students pointed out, the user/practitioner was also an authority. To “Gather [the grass] close to the roote” is evidence, that is, of how the woman using this recipe necessarily walked among the plants she gathered, touched them, identified which, in this case, had the white spots and three leaves (and not another grass). She was expected to exercise her discretion, using “so much Allome as will make the water tast roughe uppon [her] tounge” or ascertaining how much honey is just enough to make it “Looke yeollowe” and “taste very sweete.”

As we talked, though, we queried whether the patient him/herself, the treated body, was also a source of authority here. After all, the body receiving the cure, it was hoped, would respond positively to the treatment, whose precise timing was determined, at least in part, by how “soore” the eye was; and the patient’s more willful response played a role in the cure’s efficacy as demonstrated by the directive to “sleepe after it, if they cann.” But what about the potential authority and/or agency of the ingredients themselves, the nonhuman things from which the cure is derived—the grass and daisy roots, the honey, the fire, etc? After all, they contain properties that might be predictable to some extent, but individually and collectively they are arguably not entirely within the control of human manipulation. And we made note that the durability of the product comprised of such ingredients depended on seasonality—it, not surprisingly, lasts one less week during summer than during winter. In this way, do not the seasons dictate terms that the human practitioner cannot entirely mitigate through careful preparation?

What we concluded, and I think it is an important conclusion, is that this recipe illustrates a powerful collaboration of agents—human and nonhuman alike—whose efficacy is determined by multiple sources of authority, all acting together in dance-like fashion, where lines of demarcation between the individual and collective necessarily vanish. Just as importantly, though, we came to these conclusions collaboratively. And that, I would say, gets at the heart of what environmental justice (and ecofeminist) work aims to do and precisely what is, for me at least, what working with these books can teach us. We interrogate and revise together, looking anew at that which we often don’t see or take for granted: the relationship between human and nonhuman comprised, mitigated, and expressed in the most complicated of ways by a multitude of agents, articulated most powerfully in the substratum and the margins. We need to look and listen. And we need to do it together.

**I want to note the outstanding students in my graduate seminar without whose collaboration this post would not exist: Taryn Dollings, Henry Doss, Kailan Smith, and Breane Weber.