Community Cookbook Collection: Resources

In this article, Lisa Mastrangelo writes not only about the historical and cultural (and culinary) import of community cookbooks, but that "they function as literature practices of a community" (2015, pg. 73). Later she asserts that community cookbooks "in addition to sharing their community history through their recipes, they also reflect material conditions and geographical and traditional identities..." (pg. 83). Thus, the community cookbook was a way to share the identity of a community with outsiders (as Mastrangelo points out in the article) and insiders alike and for the latter, to participate in community through memory and understood context of certain recipes and language.

Jill Nussel, through the lens of her own experience inheriting the community cookbook contributed to by her grandmother, explores the different ways that community cookbooks can be read, interpreted, and the kinds of meaning that can be extrapolated. What do community cookbooks tell historians (and other readers) about the hierarchy of the organization compiling the cookbook, about the ways women navigated the domestic sphere and traditional gender roles, what was the process of assimilation into their communities (if the women were immigrants)?

As the title suggests, Cynthia Williams Resor discusses the value of exploring community cookbooks in the high school classroom: they may be used as primary sources to teach social studies and history content. Included in the article are suggested classroom activities, a resources list, and graphic organizer template.

Alison Kelley, in the November/December 2015 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, writes about community cookbooks over the past 150 years as a way to trace the ever changing America due to immigration and industrialization among other things. Culinary traditions are essential to American culture (regional and national). There is a link in this article to the LOC early community cookbook collection.

This 2012 post by Jessica Stoller-Conrad on NPR's food blog, The Salt, discusses the historical value of community cookbooks.

Anne Bower edits this collection of essays on community cookbooks. She writes that she hopes readers of the collection will appreciate that "these books contain the writing of women who took time and energy to formulate written discourse not only to raise money for a cause but also to formulate and express their collective value system and to produce texts of their own, balancing generic cookbook characteristics with their own desires for innovation and style." (1997, pg. 4).