By Melina Moe
From the Helen Witty Papers, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yield: One comprehensive book on sweet preserving, “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first).”
Prep time: At least twelve years (1974–1986), possibly longer.
Status: Unsealed.
Ingredients
- 1 typed proposal to Sally Kovalchick at Workman Publishing, dated September 30, 1986
- 1 working list of raw ingredients, “far from complete,” with more than 200 entries
- 1 food safety testing sheet, annotated in red and black ink
- Clippings, in quantity, from newspapers and magazines
- Recipes borrowed, adapted, and attributed from sources spanning centuries
- Handwritten marginalia, to taste
Method
Among the working papers of food writer Helen Witty (1921–2023), now held at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, sits a project that never became a book. Witty was a two-time James Beard Award winner, editor at Cuisine and Food & Wine, and author of Better Than Store-Bought (1979) and Fancy Pantry (1986). Her archive documents a career that ranged from editor and recipe developer to authority on American home cooking at a time when the food-writing world was still a small and largely male professional scene.[i] She called one of those unfinished projects America Preserved, and in a 1986 proposal to her publisher described it as “the book on sweet preserving in America.”[ii]
It was, in other words, an ambitious book. But perhaps one appropriately scaled to its subject, since preserving is as broad and deep a cooking technique as one could imagine. Evidence of deliberate food drying in the Middle East stretches back to roughly 12,000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks packed quince in honey; the Romans cooked the two together to produce the ancestor of marmalade.[iii] For most of human history, salting, smoking, fermenting, and sugaring were not cooking techniques so much as serious strategies for addressing the challenge of food logistics– that is, how not to starve between harvests, through long voyages, or on military campaigns. In much of the world, preserving remains an economic necessity. But in the U.S., and likely for Witty’s audience, preserving had undergone a gradual shift toward the enthusiastic hobbyist or serious foodie looking to capture the flavor notes of a season for the less verdant times of year. As the National Center for Home Food Preservation puts it, we have moved “from ‘preserve because we have to’ to ‘preserve because we like to.’”
Preserving has attracted an idiosyncratic cast of historical devotees. Nostradamus, before he was a prophet, was an apothecary who published his Treatise on Cosmetics and Jams in 1555. It was a bestseller featuring cherry jelly “fit to set before a King,” alongside love potions and plague remedies. In the summer of 1898, Marie Curie put up fourteen pots of gooseberry jelly and discovered polonium.[iv]
Witty’s America Preserved intended to carry on this lineage of serious, obsessive preservers. In the archive, we can find her proposed table of contents, which runs several pages: jams, jellies, conserves, fruit butters, marmalades, syrups, fruit pastes, curds, nectars, leathers, spoon sweets, fruits preserved in alcohol, and candied peels. A hand-written annotation suggests she was considering whether sweet-pickled fruits counted as preserves or relishes. Her working list of raw ingredients ran to more than 200 entries. She wanted to cover not just recipes but the science of pectin, the question of sugar substitutes, the uses of a pressure cooker, and the history behind it all: “lore, history, old art, old recipes,” updated for modern cooks in what she called “post-nostalgia” versions.
Like all archives worth their shelf space, though, what her papers illustrate most vividly is how Witty worked. The neatly-labeled folders (“S” for “spoon sweets”) are stuffed with clippings from newspapers and magazines, recipes gathered from other cooks, notes from conversations with food scientists at Cornell and extension agents on Long Island. A food safety testing sheet lists recipes she sent to the Suffolk County Cooperative Extension test kitchen and is annotated “okay” in red ink or flagged for further checking. Those recipes she sent for the students to verify include baked cranberry preserves with orange and cardamom, Bing cherries in a sweet nine-day pickle, Escoffier’s condiment of sweet peppers. Witty’s “personal” recipe collection was archival. She was a collector who tested, tasted, selected, innovated, annotated, and eventually shared her recipes in cookbooks. This is appropriate for a book that winkingly aspired to be “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first),” since the long history has always contained such borrowing and inheritance, with recipes across fences and through generations, each cook adjusting the sugar, swapping the spice, making it theirs. Witty’s book didn’t come to fruition, though it is preserved in her archive, which, like a garden in September, shows she may have had too many good things on her hands at once.
[i] Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. The guide to the boxes was compiled by Anne E. Witty, September 2022.
[ii] Helen Witty to Sally Kovalchick, September 30, 1986, Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Box 7.
[iii] For a lively overview, see Sue Shephard, Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
[iv] Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). See also Rebecca Rupp, “Jam: Chemistry and Cool in a Jar,” National Geographic, 2021.
Melina Moe is the Curator of Literature at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where the Helen S. Witty papers are held.
