State We're In: Reflections on Minnesota History

Embracing Compiled Cookbooks as Historical Documents

271 TracI M. naThanS-kelly s Embracing Compiled Cookbooks as Historical Documents Compiled cookbooks are those wonderful, plentiful, and helpful books that many of us have. They come from churches, community groups, volunteer efforts, and individuals. They are the product of family reunions, centennials, retirements, birthdays, and other memorable occasions. These often spiral-bound collections sit on our bookshelves , in church and community libraries, and in special collections. They can be purchased by the pound at auctions, and they are sold by the lot on eBay. These are the quaint and wonderful cookbooks that we turn to in winter when we need some comfort food or in summer for a picnic idea. Beyond that, they are often overlooked. Yet I believe they need to be regarded with much more care than they have been given in the past, especially when we consider that some of them are, indeed, rich repositories of community histories. In this essay, I will look at some of these cookbooks as primary sources and offer some prompting on how we may use these documents to enhance our understanding of communities.1 Cookbooks! traci m. nathans-kelly—who holds a PhD in English and teaches in an engineering school—is used to looking at old things in new ways. Earlier historians might have overlooked cookbooks as legitimate and valuable historical sources, but Nathans-Kelly shows that that was a mistake.These seemingly empty sources provide the recipe in her hands for producing a wealth of information and knowledge about cooking , yes, but more importantly about community life and ethnicity, secondarily and more implicitly about the ingredients of women’s lives. Cookbooks are both documents and artifacts, she urges, and they tell multiple stories when we learn how to decipher their code. She invites us to relook at cookbooks and, at the same time, to look around to see what other “documents” we might have dismissed that, with the right questions, can be employed to fortify our understanding of the past. 272 eMbracIng coMpIled cookbookS u 273 Within the pages of a compiled cookbook, we can find clues about local culture,community norms,local history,and even individual personalities and relationships. While it may be hard to get beyond reading the recipe for Alice’s Seven-Layer Heaven-Sent Chocolate Cake (now we want to go to the kitchen, not our desks), turning our efforts toward the study of these texts reveals the historical nuggets that they have to offer. For example, in 1976 in recognition of the U.S. bicentennial, Winona County, Minnesota, published a cookbook entitled Recipes of the Past. Compiled by Mrs.A.Ga.(Lucille) Lackore of the Winona County American Bicentennial Committee, this unassuming wire-bound book contains voices and histories from across the county. In the table of contents we can see that the intent was to preserve the foodways of various ethnic groups within the county. Instead of listing recipes by Bicentennial cookbook (cover, facing page, and contents, above) published in Winona County 274 u naThanS-kelly dish or ingredients (no section here for “Desserts,” for example), we see food categorized by the culture or homeland: Bohemian, English, French, German, Indian, Irish, Jewish, Luxembourgers [sic], Polish, Scandinavian, Scots, and Swiss. At the end is the “Historical” section ,a collection of recipes that have some sort of claimed provenance: Benjamin Franklin’s Fish House Punch, Bess Truman’s Pound Cake, Corncob Jelly from Winona City Representative M. J.“Mac”and Mrs. McCauley, and so forth. While it may seem odd to read so much into the structure of a contents page,this one page tells us much.Mrs.Lackore,working alone or with others (she often uses the term “we” when referring to the cookbook efforts), decided that the book was to be about the ethnic groups in Winona County, foregrounding that aspect rather than the traditional culinary categories, significant historical moments, or any other possible organizational method. This book is about the groups that have made Winona County the wonderful place that it is, and nothing less.The balance of recipes also is noteworthy; there are four pages for Bohemian recipes,five pages of Indian (Native American) recipes,and seven pages reserved for the Luxembourgers. More pages, of course, are devoted to sections for the English,Germans,and Scandinavians— not surprising, considering their predominance in the Winona area. The Scandinavian section offers a rich description,a hidden history, of local...