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.
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.
