From the collection of Samuel and Narcissa Chamberlain.

(2005 edition) This book of recipes from Kentucky and Virginia cooks was one of the first southern cookbooks to recognize the contributions of the African American cooks who worked in southern households. Though many of the recipes developed by those cooks are signed here by their white mistresses who have such names as “Mrs. Henry C. Buckner” and “Mrs. Woodford Spears”, several recipes are credited to a man named Marcellus, whose photographic portrait is included in the volume. The other photographs are of mostly unnamed African American women cooks, with the exception of an Aunt Frances and Aunt Maria. In a 2005 reprint of this work, Toni Tipton-Martin offers new research about these individuals and the context for their work.

The photographs are likely the last American work of the renowned photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who left the United States forever in the year this book appeared.

From the collection of Sophie Coe.

The Bride’s Cookbook and the accompanying recipe portfolio My Lady's Recipes, though published separately, share the same chapter title page illustrations and were clearly meant to go together. The cookbook gathers recipes aimed at young wives and housekeepers with little knowledge and aims at being “entirely practical”. The portfolio contains blank pages, many of which are filled in by a former owner, and it also contains clippings and handwritten recipes in other hands.

“Olive Green” was the cookbook-writing pseudonym of the hugely successful author Myrtle Reed, who under her real name published dozens of works including biographies, short stories, and romance novels, the best known of which is Lavender and Old Lace (1902). She also published articles on household subjects as Katherine LaFarge Norton. This book is one of a best-selling set of ten issued in identical blue gingham covers, comprising 10,000 detailed and well-researched recipes for everything from breakfast to dessert, and written with “wit, humor, and erudition,” in the words of Jan Longone. Reed’s life was not so cheery; though she publicly portrayed her household as blissfully happy and her spouse as the model husband, she took her life in 1911, leaving a note that implicated her husband in her unhappiness.

From the James C. Whitten Collection on the History of Vegetarianism.

Mr. and Mrs. Christian were self-made dietary experts. He titled himself “F.S.D.,” food science doctor, and offered a diploma in food science at his School of Applied Food Chemistry in New York City. “A good food scientist can earn $10,000 a year,” he advertised in 1910, and he proclaimed the need for corrective eating, maintaining that “…over 90% of all disease is caused by errors in eating. Scientific feeding, therefore, is the broadest field in the relief of human suffering.” He and his wife wrote that their own ills, which made them “so impaired in health as to almost totally disqualify us for the performance of our daily work”, were completely relieved by consuming only uncooked foods. The Christians published many treatises and cookbooks together, with Mrs. Griswold acting as publisher for some of them. Among her other pursuits were the development of a line of baby foods and distribution of the Vieno brand of self-raising bran meal.

This book is part of the James C. Whitten Collection on the History of Vegetarianism, a rich collection recently acquired by Schlesinger that includes hundreds of books, periodicals, pamphlets, menus, postcards, and other ephemera on vegetarianism, animal rights, health cures, and other related subjects, ranging from the 18th century through our own time.

From the collection of Julia Child.

Restored in honor of Dr. Harold and Iris Chandler in recognition of their support of the Culinary Collection.

From the James C. Whitten Collection on the History of Vegetarianism.

Gift of Sophie Coe.
Heath, credited with more than 100 cookery books, hoped that this book would be “of some help to the cooks of fishermen, and perhaps of some novelty to the anglers themselves.” Though he avoided gendered language in that prefatory statement, the editor’s dust jacket flap text chortles, “If the husband can boast of his catches, his wife may now console herself with her friends’ jealousy of her super-excellent dishes!”

A youth who deflated his parents’ expectations by not attending Oxford, he changed his name (from Francis Geoffrey Miller) and created his own career path as a food journalist and cookbook author during the 1930s and ’40s, turning out many useful volumes of well researched and tested recipes, including several directed at wartime cooks.

From the James C. Whitten Collection on the History of Vegetarianism.

Gift of Mrs. Jefferson Patterson.

From the collection of Julia Child.

Gift of the Plymouth County Wildlands Trust.

The preface states: “When the revision of this book was begun a year ago we had no intimation that international obligations would lead our land of plenty to ration cards. It now goes to print with a number of emergency chapters added, written to meet the difficulties that beset the present-day cook.”

Gift of Betty Weiss Parnes, Leta Weiss Marks, and F. Lee Eiseman.

This recipe book and the accompanying jar of Créole spice blend from Kiskatom Farm record the legacy of Caroline Dreyfous Weiss, a Jewish woman in New Orleans who started her own business marketing her spice blend made from herbs grown at the family’s summer house. Her husband, successful architect Leon Weiss, designed the Louisiana state capitol and governor’s mansion for Huey Long, but went to prison for two years as a result of the “Louisiana Scandals.” Their daughter Leta Weiss records in her memoir, Time’s Tapestry (1997), that orders for the spices and the cookbook Caroline wrote with her husband’s help came from all over the world even during the war years. Caroline would sell the jars of herbs stuffed into the pockets of “mammy” dolls or nestled in Spanish moss in plain red boxes.

Gift of Richard Safford.

Ardavast D. Kashkashian writes in the introduction to this community cookbook: “Our hope is high that young Armenians will seize upon these recipes … as an heirloom and make them their own. It is no disrespect to America to wish this. He who does not know whence he came will not care much where he is going.” In addition the writers hope to interest adventurous Americans in Armenian cuisine. The Union was a service organization that devoted itself to ameliorating the suffering of Armenian refugees of the two world wars and to providing a cultural tie for Armenians scattered in many countries, with chapters in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa. The Detroit Women’s chapter gathered the recipes from its members and issued the cookbook to raise money for the Union.

This valuable compendium produced by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian gives recipes in English but provides their Cherokee names, in Cherokee script and transliterated; included are preparations for chestnut bread, Knee-Deeps (early frogs), ramps, swamp potatoes, yellowjacket soup, crayfish, baked squirrel, hominy soup, and old field apricot drink. A series of photographs documents Mrs. Aggie Lossiah (an elderly granddaughter of John Ross, Principal Cherokee Chief during the 1830s removal of the tribe) making bean bread for a group of white visitors, and a Cherokee Feast staged for a scholarly conference in 1949 is described in detail.

Gift of Avis DeVoto.

Gift of Jeanne Lesem.

These recipes were “compiled by the wives of Park Service employees and their friends” and are a combination of traditional and newer uses of local staple ingredients. “All have been used by the donors; many have been handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter.” Included are recipes for Indian Bean Bread and Chestnut Bread, with a note from contributor Mrs. Ben C. Fisher: “The Indians taught us to make Chestnut Bread and Bean Bread.” The drawings by Mrs. Patsy Gilbert show homemade cooking implements and various techniques used for food preparation.

From the estate of Ella Fitzgerald, “First Lady of Song.”

Gaskins states in her introduction that many of the women cooks whose recipes are gathered here were professional cooks in the Alexandria, Virginia, area. She also reminisces about growing up in a circle of “tight friends” whose homes were open to one another at all times and who often cooked together: “A Negro kitchen belongs to any woman who wants to use it. There are no cookbooks there.”

The endorsement from journalist and cookbook author Craig Claiborne on the cover speaks to the great interest in “soul food” starting in the late 1960s and the upsurge of cookbooks written by African Americans at that time.

From the collection of Julia Child.

This book contains a manuscript letter to Julia Child from the translator, Nina Simonds, written on the front fly leaf, “since they have weird postal regulations concerning sending books with letters.” Julia Child had a life-long interest in Chinese cooking as a result of her time spent in post-World War II China with her husband Paul Child, who introduced her to regional Chinese food.

There were at least two editions of this little handmade book in the 1950s, and a more recent version, the same size but with completely new recipes, appeared in 1989. All editions feature recipes for local fish and game, such as seal, bear, ptarmigan, oogruk, caribou, and Eskimo ice cream, made with reindeer tallow and seal oil. The recipes are signed and accompanied by drawings. These precious books record a disappearing way of life, and, even more poignantly, a disappearing locale: Sarichef Island, on which the 400-year old village of Shishmaref is located, will eventually be completely evacuated under government order on account of rapidly rising ocean water levels caused by global warming, making its inhabitants refugees of climate change and bringing the life of this village to an end. There were probably few other printed works published by this vanishing community.

Gift of Barbara and Bob Wheaton.

“Limited to 200 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies hors de commerce.” This is copy no. 114.

Brillat-Savarin’s influential work was originally published in France in 1825. Fisher first published her translation in 1949.