Tag Archives: poetry

American Studies, Family and Household, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

The Poet’s Table: Recipes of the Sandburg Family

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By Madi Duran

When it comes to the eating habits of poet Carl Sandburg’s family, we know that they generally enjoyed hearty meals made from simple, homegrown ingredients. Fresh baked bread, hearty stews, and plenty of products made from Mrs. Lilian Sandburg’s prized Chikaming Dairy goats’ milk were the norm for the family at Connemara, their home in Flat Rock, North Carolina. We have few recipes written by the family in the collection, with most of our knowledge about their eating habits coming from oral histories with the daughters and grandchildren after Carl Sandburg’s death in 1967. However, scanned copies of recipe cards provided by his daughter, Helga Sandburg Crile, and granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, for the reference files at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site show how Mrs. Lilian Sandburg integrated recipes learned from her Luxembourgian parents and ones honoring her husband Carl’s Swedish heritage into their lives. There are also instructions written by Mrs. Sandburg herself for making goat cheeses in various styles, like a simple cooked cheese and a nut Neufchâtel, and her well-used copy of The Settlement Cookbook (1901).

Fig. 1. Recipes for Oma’s grape wine and a dandelion wine, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

A recipe for dandelion wine points back to Mrs. Sandburg’s European immigrant parents, the Steichens. Dandelions were brought by European colonists in the 1600s, both as a source of edible greens and as a means to make a cheaper alternative to grape wine.[i] A grape wine recipe, passed down by “Oma,” the German word for grandmother and used by the Steichens to refer to Mrs. Sandburg’s mother, is accompanied by a note urging the recipient to “keep this in verry [sic] save [sic] place as it is verry [sic] good resepie [sic].” Another recipe for cold borscht is specifically labeled as coming from the Steichens, and a pound cake is also accompanied by “Oma” in parentheses.

Fig. 2. A collection of Swedish Christmas cookies copied at an unknown time, likely by Helga Sandburg Crile.
Fig. 3. A recipe for Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite German pfeffernüsse cookies, typed for the Park by her granddaughter Paula Steichen Polega in 1979.

When it comes to holiday fare, a variety of Swedish cookie recipes have been saved, an homage to Carl Sandburg’s Swedish heritage: Swedish butter cookies, spritsar, and one recipe card simply labeled “Swedish Christmas Cookies” that call for warming spices and molasses, like a gingerbread but without any ginger. However, Mrs. Sandburg’s heritage is evident in a much-beloved recipe for pfeffernüsse that her granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, passed on to the park with the remark that it was “Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite.” It seems only fitting that the family made efforts to reconnect with their heritage during the holidays, a time for celebration, togetherness, and remembrance.

Fig. 4. A recipe for “Connemara Custard” copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

The recipes documenting various uses for goat milk reflect Mrs. Sandburg’s dedication to bettering the dairy goat industry, including her own award-winning Chikaming Dairy herd, and desire to make goat milk a mainstream alternative for traditional dairy products. Even in basic recipes one can find evidence of her family’s flavor profile — anise and nutmeg appear in almost every cookie recipe, and anise makes an appearance in the recipe for cooked cheese written by Mrs. Sandburg. A custard recipe is modified into “Connemara Custard” by substituting goat milk for condensed milk. The recipe for a nut Neufchâtel, a cheese believed to date back to sixth-century Normandy,[ii] is also reimagined as a goat dairy product by Mrs. Sandburg from their days in Harbert, Michigan.

Fig. 5. A recipe for Nut Neufchatel goat cheese created by Mrs. Sandburg pre-1945 and distributed as part of her dairy goat operation, Chikaming Goat Farm, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

While we do not have many written recipes for the Sandburg family, what we do have illustrates how Mrs. Sandburg blended hers and her husband’s cultural backgrounds into memorable foods for her family and her ability to adapt recipes for her own health and benefit with goat dairy products. Some additional recipes used by the family can be found on a park webpage that references Lizzie Black Kander’s The Settlement Cookbook,[iii] a staple in the Sandburg home that can be seen in the kitchen in the historic house museum. Originally created for immigrants in Milwaukee, Kander’s work combined traditional Eastern European and American recipes.[iv] The use of this book also points to both the Sandburg and Steichen families’ lived experiences as European immigrants settling in the American Midwest — though they were in Illinois and Michigan, respectively, rather than Wisconsin. The use of The Settlement Cookbook, further exemplifies the efforts Mrs. Sandburg made to honor her and her husband’s European heritage and their lived experiences as first-generation Americans.

Figs. 6 and 7. Photographs of the Sandburgs’ copy of The Settlement Cookbook on display in their kitchen at Connemara.

At the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, we have a varied collection that shows a life well-lived. As the final home of an illustrious author, Connemara includes thousands of books on display and a large archival collection in our repository, but also, uniquely, the evidence of the Sandburgs’ mundane daily life, which sets it apart from other collections. Half-smoked cigars, tens of thousands of annotated bookmarks, and unfinished knitting projects are just some of the artifacts left behind by the Sandburg family. Recipes, too, tell a part of their story. Though the original recipe cards remain in the hands of descendants, the scanned copies in our reference files and the copy of The Settlement Cookbook reveal staples of the family’s diet as well as foods chosen for special occasions like Christmas, showcasing their values and heritage through their diet.

[i] Kate Dingwall, “Summery, Sweet and Refreshing: Get to Know Dandelion Wine,” Wine Enthusiast, May 17, 2024.

[ii] Ma. Luisa De Guzman, “Neufchatel Cheese,” What Cheese, March 5, 2024.

[iii] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.

[iv] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.

Madi Duran is a Museum Technician at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. She has had a love of museums ever since she was a child and has been volunteering and working at museums since she was in high school. In 2020 she graduated from St Olaf College with a degree in Art History, and went on to complete her master’s in Museum Studies through the University of Oklahoma’s online program in 2024. She started as an intern at the Carl Sandburg Home NHS in 2021 and began working as a National Park Service employee in 2024. She loves sharing information about the collection and Sandburg family with the public through the park’s official social media pages, speaking to visitors, assisting researchers, and sharing information through publications like this one!

Autumn 2025, Experimentation, Family and Household, Posts, Pre Modern

Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean

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By Leonie Böttiger

On the purpose of the urjuza:

This urjuza I have entrusted / with useful benefits, all of them tested

Of what our collection will have need / so, accept what I say in evidence, indeed

O you who these matters investigate / memorise all that I relate

For I have set for humankind in my verse / nothing but the truth of all you observe[1]

The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.
The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.

Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection?

Readers might be familiar with what is arguably the most famous of English rhymed recipes: the witches’ song from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the three sorceresses cook up a potion featuring ingredients both disgusting and nonsensical. This Barbadian rum punch rhyme or Reverend Sydney Smith’s rhymed salad recipe might instead offer more delectable examples of culinary poetry, while The Recipes Project has previously highlighted playful aspects of recipes, including satire and rhyme.

Arabic, a language famed for its poetical tradition, also boasts its fair share of food-related poetry—but a curious North African craft recipe collection made up entirely of rhymed couplets might be a closer kin to the English playwright’s double trouble, though admittedly less renowned.

The Eloquent Poem in Rajaz[2] on the Proper Crafts was probably composed sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century CE by one Abu Bakr al-Kharrat, likely somewhere in North Africa, based on the manuscript evidence—we don’t have any other sources about his life. The Eloquent Poem has survived in at least five manuscripts which are now housed in Paris, Leiden, Gotha, and Djerba, and one of which is dated to 1579 CE. Arranged in four maqālāt (sg. maqāla) or treatises, the short book is a didactic poem which consists of recipes for various household and other craft activities.

Versified recipes can be considered an almost ‘double-didactic’ genre: both the recipe and the poem are inherently concerned with the transmission of knowledge. As such, they present an intriguing lens through which to approach the poetic adaptation and dissemination of knowledge: what does it mean to transform recipes for scribal arts and household activities into didactic verse?

For Abu Bakr, poetry had the decisive advantage of being easier to memorise and transmit—a device humans had taken advantage of for centuries, if not millennia, before its mechanisms were ever explained by psychologists and neurolinguists. He explains in his brief foreword:

“Now then, brother, […] I have compiled for you in this poem benefits and useful properties for whatever purposes you wish. You informed me that you are keen to attain it in a way that eases its memorisation and transmission, and I have abbreviated the composition and clarified what I have set forth of my knowledge…”

Abu Bakr does not mention any of his sources, but many of the recipes contained in the poem have parallels in older Arabic recipe collections from all across the Arabic-speaking world, dealing with stain removal and other crafts, as well as in books on the occult properties of substances, attesting to a fluid body of knowledge that was nevertheless transmitted somewhat cohesively.

Unlike his predecessors, Abu Bakr, however, did not seem to hold much esteem for established authorities: as we see in the excerpt above, as well as in several other places in his text, he continuously highlights his own expertise, claiming that he is presenting his own knowledge. Where older texts make frequent reference to Greek, Roman, or even Indian physicians and scholars (think Dioscorides, Galen, or Suśruta) to substantiate and verify the efficacy of their recipes, Abu Bakr does not mention any ancient authorities. This might reflect both a shift in how expertise was construed at the time the Eloquent Poem was composed as well as its expected audience: What use was it to namedrop Aristotle if his name meant nothing to your readers—or perhaps, listeners? It seems that Abu Bakr considered highlighting his own practice-based expertise a more useful strategy to convey authority onto his text.

So, what did that look like in practice? The following recipe, to remove stains from clothes, may give a little taste of Abu Bakr’s style (I have tried my best to retain the rhyme scheme):

Whoever loves knowledge, clearly to comprehend / Should vinegar and potash blend

In a pot, raised on the fire to stay / For three hours of the day

And wash the fabric and the wool with this / For it is described by my premise

I mean it removes every stain, alluded / before this, and is concluded.

Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.
Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.

About half of this recipe consists of material that is merely there to make the rhyme work. It thus facilitates memorisation but wouldn’t be strictly required to actually follow the procedure. Additionally, and similarly to its non-versified cousins, the recipe above does not offer any quantities or measurements apart from the “three hours” boiling time for the vinegar and potash. Now, stain removal is not necessarily an exact science, but the absence of such specifications indicates that people were likely familiar with the procedures described. This lack of measurements is also the case in recipes that require more precision, such as making inks, where a drop of liquid can mean the difference between a rich, saturated colour and a watery splotch:

Green verdigris, o you of bright mind / with vinegar smoothly grind

And mix it, my friend, with dissolved mastic / Write with it, it turns doubtlessly fantastic

Among the most amazing things with which to write / And ask, if you don’t know, someone who has tried!

As we have seen, Abu Bakr’s Eloquent Poem provides a unique glimpse into what was considered useful knowledge, addressing a wide array of needs in an easy-to-memorise format while stressing the importance of practical experience. Finally, italso offers practical solutions for getting rid of all kinds of pests—no quantities required, but PLEASE do not try at home:

Whoever wants to expel every mouse / from all the corners of the house

Should scatter arsenic on the fire / in his room or the house entire

He does this once, on a Friday / and doesn’t see a mouse in his house—all away!

Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.
Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.

*****
Leonie Böttiger (formerly Rau) is a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Her PhD project investigates premodern Arabic recipe collections as resources of knowledge, focusing on a variety of disciplinary contexts, periods, and regions. Leonie has written about premodern Arabic recipes for the Library of Arabic Literature, the American Historical Association, and The Recipes Project. She is the managing editor at ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly.

[1] All translations from Arabic are mine.

[2] An Arabic poetic metre typically used for didactic poetry. A poem written in rajaz is called an urjuza.

 

American Studies, Digital History, Posts, Winter 2024, Women and Gender

Critically Making Games from Historical Cookbooks

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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/.

Animals, Early Modern, Printed Books

Wyl bucke his Testament, or, an Ode to Dining on Venison

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

I recently stumbled upon a small print cookbook at the Newberry Library in Chicago while I was working on another project. I couldn’t help but request this 1560 volume which was supposed to have recipes, according to the catalogue entry. I was particularly intrigued given its title, Wyl bucke his Testament, which made no mention of cooking, food, or recipes. Once I began reading the book, I realized this delightful book had likely fallen through the cracks of culinary scholarship because it has been categorized as a poem rather than a cookery. The verse details a hunter’s killing of a buck and his last will and testament prior to his death. The subsequent recipes, which are in prose, coordinate with the verse, as they are entirely devoted to dishes featuring deer meat and offal. While this collection of sixteen recipes has not been listed in cookery bibliographies, it is not entirely unknown. The book was reprinted in 1827 and several literature scholars have recently, albeit briefly, discussed the introductory verse.[1] I found this unique cookbook to be very entertaining; here I hope to introduce you to recipes which may prove useful in your own academic and culinary adventures.

Richard Ansdell, “The Dying Stag,” 1871, New York Public Library Digital Collections. Source: The New York Public Library.

Wyl bucke is unlike any other medieval or early modern cookbook I have encountered. In a way, it is reminiscent of the fifteenth-century Liber cure cocorum in its literary attributes and oddity (for the entire cookbook is composed in verse), or even the famous eighteenth-century poem by Robert Burns, “Address to a Haggis.” Wyl bucke is personal; it is a voyeuristic peek into the last moments of a dying, anthromorphized deer. The recipes are a direct connection to the buck’s death and the instructions are interspersed with plain instruction for breaking down and preparing a deer for consumption. The buck bequeaths each part of his body for different purposes and people. The deer is cognizant of his destiny on the table as he bequeaths his body “to the colde seler.”[2] He feeds the royal and the ordinary, his body providing both sustenance and pleasure.

The recipes use different parts of the deer, both flesh and offal. Beginning with a menu for a three-course venison feast, the recipes are interspersed with instructions for harvesting the organs and breaking down the joints after the hunt. The recipes are not dependent upon the procuring of a male deer; the author provides options for buck and doe meat, as well as comments on cooking with the meat of a fawn or other small deer.

One of the most extraordinary attributes of this collection is that the recipes are focused on a single ingredient. The fact that the ingredient is venison is also remarkable. As a hunted ingredient, venison was typically reserved for noble households. Nevertheless, non-nobles could procure venison through both legal and illegal means as venison was available for sale and was poached. While venison recipes appear in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cookbooks, it is usually in roasted or baked form. The recipes in Wyl bucke, however, are familiar dishes with deer meat and organs substituted for more typical meat products. One finds Ising pudding, haggis, frumenty, and chewets, as well as preparations for tripe, trotters, tongue, liver, and numbles. I was struck by the juxtaposition of high- and low-status ingredients in this cookery. Humble oatmeal appears with some regularity, and many recipes use few or no spices. Yet other recipes instruct a very liberal use of saffron, an always expensive spice, even when produced domestically.

There is a lone exception in this collection: a recipe for “tarte Barbones” excludes venison, or flesh of any variety.[3] I have not encountered this recipe in other collections. In fact, I cannot even find another reference to this dish after searching my own records as well as the Oxford English Dictionary, but it does look delicious despite its outlier nature. The tart is a low-walled cheese tart flavored with saffron and sweetened with sugar; no doubt an excellent accompaniment with or conclusion to a venison meal.

The authorship of Wyl bucke remains shrouded in mystery. The poem also appears in two sixteenth-century manuscripts (Bodleian Library, Oxford S Rawlinson C 813, fols. 30-31v and British Library MS Cotton Julius A V, fol. 131v), but the recipes only appear in the print form. The printed text credits John Lacy, but he is not otherwise known as an author.[4] I am tempted to say that the recipe author was from Northern England due to the reoccurrence of oatmeal. While this ingredient pops up in other early modern recipes, it is rare to see oatmeal multiple times in a single collection. I suspect that one could better hone in on the geographical origins of the recipes, and possibly the collection’s authorship, by delving into the provenance of two recipes in the collection: “tarte Barbones” and “Bawderikes.”[5]

A little more is known about the book’s printing than its authorship. Wyl bucke was printed by William Copeland. An active printer, Copeland produced a variety of books. Earlier in his career, he tended toward printing books with a theological bent, but by 1560 he was producing books popular in the late Middle Ages. That year he also printed A mery geste of Robyn Hoode and of hys lyfe, Syr Beuys of Hampton, and The knight of the swanne. Soon thereafter he produced several books which serve as friendly accompaniments to cookeries, like The craft of graffing and planting of trees (1563), The boke of secretes of Albartus Magnus of the vertues of herbes, stones and certaine beastes. (ca. 1565), and The first booke of the vertues of certayne herbes (ca. 1565). Wyl bucke’s account of a hunt, as well as many accompanying common medieval recipes, aligns with Copeland’s printing record. At only eight leaves, Wyl bucke is a small book which would have been priced inexpensively, and therefore available to middling and gentry consumers.

I hope that this very brief introduction has whetted your appetite and culinary scholars will remember Wyl bucke and include it in their own research. There is much more to learn about this small volume’s recipes, authorship, and connection to other contemporary texts.

 

NOTES

[1] The most extensive treatment of this book is: Edward Wilson, “The Testament of the Buck and the Sociology of the Text,” in The Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (1994): 157–184.

[2] fol. A. ii r.

[3] fol. B. iiii.r.

[4] Wilson, “The Testament of the Buck,” 157–8.

[5] fols. B. iiii.r–v.

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