Processing the Educational Cookery Collection, Part 3

As promised, this week we’re at the end of processing the Educational Cookery Collection (yay)! And, I remembered to take pictures while I was working on the collection this week, so there are plenty of visuals below!

After all that alphabetical sorting last week, I ended up with a stack of 16 folders that look, well, like this:

Each folder has the collection number and title on the left side, the folder title in the center, and the box-folder number on the right side. Given the final decision to sort the collection by creator name, there are 15 folders for letters of the alphabet and one for materials without clear creators. They sat in a stack on my desk as I worked through creating bibliographies for each folder, at which point I was shifting in their new home–an acid-free box:

In the end, they don’t take up the whole box, but that’s okay. I used the lid as a temporary spacer to keep folders from slumping or falling over, which can damage the contents over time (that’s also why, in the picture above, I turned the box on its side as I started added the first few folders to it). Before I put the box on the shelf, I made a more permanent spacer from some left over cardboard. (We keep many different kinds of scraps around here that come in handy for reuse: cardboard, old boxes, mylar, matboard…Plenty of archivists like to reuse and creatively “upcycle” where they can!) Also, this means we have space to add more items later!

The other part of processing, of course, is the intellectual description and processing. We use software called ArchivesSpace, which lets us keep track of new accessions, digital objects (scans), subjects, and creators, and helps us create the finding aids we put in Virginia Heritage. If you’re curious what it looks like, this is a screenshot with the list of folders for this collection. The navigation links in the lower left help us jump around the rest of the record below, since more complex collections can have a lot of content.

As I finished writing up the notes in the collection, I also grabbed a screenshot of those. The software consolidates sections with a lot of content (like the Subjects, in this case) and when you are viewing a section (like the Notes), shows you shortened versions, which you can expand and edit. I promise, it can save a fair bit of scrolling if you’re trying to get a specific section. The sidebar on the left shows you, at a glance, connections between this and other records or how many elements there are in a given section. In this collection, for example, there’s a link between this and one existing accession record, a single “date” component, and 9 notes.

Looking at that screenshot reminded me I missed something. That left side navigation can also help with that. If you’re expecting a number next to a part of the record and it’s not there, it’s a good reminder you might need to fix that! Anyway, this resource record, as it’s called, is what we can export from ArchivesSpace, tweak a little bit, and put into Virginia Heritage for researchers everywhere to discover. I finished up the finding aid on Thursday morning, along with my final checklist of items for collections. (Seriously, I have a spreadsheet checklist for collections I process–it helps me keep track of what gets processed, as well as all the little administrative and practical steps that going along with making it discoverable!)

As I mentioned last week, every collection is a little different and I wouldn’t be surprised if we talk about processing again in the future. I hope it gives some insight into what goes on behind-the-scenes so researchers can find our materials to use. And a little bit about what those of us who work behind-the-scenes do! The finding aid for the Educational Cookery Collection (Ms2017-032) is now available online and the collection is in its home on the shelf:

So, we encourage you to come by and take a look when you have a chance! I expect this collection will grow in the future (much like some of our ephemera-based collections), and I’m looking forward to finding out what we add next!

Special Collections is on Twitter!

Just a quick announcement: Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives has joined Twitter! If you tweet, follow, or just want to check out our page, you can find us @VT_SCUA or at https://twitter.com/VT_SCUA/. We’ll be tweeting photos, facts, exhibits, events, blog posts, and more. Of course we’ll be including things about and from the History of Food and Drink Collection, so be sure to keep an eye out!

Archivistkira’s Week at Culinary Geek Camp

If you’re a long-time follower, I hoe you’ll forgive me for going a bit more off track than usual this week. You know that usually I would post images and commentary/history on an item from the History of Food and Drink Collection. The thing is, last week, I got to do something amazing and 100% food history related. And I really want to talk about it. I think it may give our readers more insight into some of my future hopes/dreams for the collection, and you’ll learn about my passion for food history. It’s going to a long post, but I’ll keep my comments short and I promise there are pictures.

Each summer, the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) hosts a week long seminar. Each year, the topic changes and you’ll never see quite the same thing again. This year, the theme was “Culinary Culture: The Politics of American Foodways, 1765-1900.” You can read more about it online.  As soon as I heard about it from a colleague who attended last year, I knew I had to go. Luckily, the faculty member leading the seminar agreed and I was accepted.

The front of the main American Antiquarian Society building, Worcester, MA.

My week was spent in the company of graduate students, faculty, and a couple of other library types from a variety of disciplines: History, Art History, English, American Studies, and Religion Studies. Led by a visiting faculty member and assisted by the staff at the AAS, we had lectures, hands-on workshops (with books, prints, ephemera, trade cards, images, and artifacts), field trips, and even time to do our own research. The archivist in me was giddy from the behind-the-scenes tour, the scholar in me was gleeful about playing in someone else’s archives, and the collection manager in me was thrilled to talk about and learn how and why people from diverse backgrounds study food and food history.

On our first day, we were shown a number of objects related to food and asked to pick one. Over the course of the week, we were supposed to keep thinking about the object, how what we talked about changed our understanding of it, and, on the last day, give a brief informal presentation about the object as an item. Some people put the object in the context of American culture at the time, others talked about how it could be used in a classroom setting to engage students, and still others used the object as a jumping off point for broader observations about what the item represented. I chose this 1759 advertisement for a merchant in Boston, printed by one Paul Revere. It was accompanied by a handwritten receipt for the items purchased by a customer, around which the ad would have been wrapped (you can still see the fold line under “Large & small Spiders” below).

1759 Advertisement for merchant Joseph Webb of Boston. Printed by Paul Revere.

Handwritten receipt from Webb to Obadiah Dickinson, 1759, accompanying the advertisement.

I could probably write a paper on what I talked about for those short 5 minutes, and I won’t linger on that today, but it won’t surprise anyone to know I focused on how this might fit in as something I would show a visiting class and what it says about culinary activities in early America.

During our daily workshops, we got to handle a wide variety of materials. The items related to the day’s theme. We spent time looking at them, then had group discussions about their significance, interest, use, etc., as they related to art, political, culinary, economic, and social/domestic history. I took lots of picture, from political cartoons to trade cards to hand-colored tea plants in a botany book. (Apologies for all the reflections, but most items were in mylar for their safety and flashes weren’t permitted. Also, I haven’t had a chance to crop and edit yet.)

A. Brown & Co. print, “Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, 1864.”

Hand-colored tea plant illustration, Ladies’ Wreath and Parlor Annual, c.1854.

Czar Baking Powder Trade Card (back). Straight out of the “baking powder wars!”

The Grocer, 1827. This tiny book contained rhymes for children relating to food, including the title piece about what a grocer does.

Of course, you don’t put a group of scholars obsessed with food together and not cook. During a trip to Old Sturbridge Village, we cooked an 1830s meal over an open hearth from scratch (stuffed and roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, carrots, rolls, greens with burnt butter dressing, lemonade, pounded cheese, and “Washington Cake” with hand-whipped cream, plus we churned and washed our own butter!). It was an eye-opening experience to actually prepare this meal and if it weren’t for 20 sets of hands, it would have taken well more than our 3 hours. We tasted and talked about hard cider, cheese and cheesemaking, and Sazeracs and other historic cocktails, and bravely sampled hardtack. On our last day together, we made gingerbread as dessert for the evening’s cook out. It was Eliza Leslie’s 1827 recipe that included a pint of molasses and four different spices. Dense as it was, it tasted amazing and I’m looking forward to making it at home for friends.

Historic Sazeracs (and yes, I got to help bartend!)

Eliza Leslie’s 1827 recipe for gingerbread, made in 2015!

Besides the fun, my pile of notes, new knowledge gained, and the chance to do research (why yes, I DID find some interesting cocktail history in manuscript form, but more on that another day), there was something even more important I learned last week and it was a large part of what I wrote about in my application essay. I wanted to meet people from different disciplines who studied food and I wanted to know why they did. I’ve worked at Virginia Tech Special Collections with the History of Food and Drink Collection for more than 6 years. One of my biggest challenges is finding ways to make it seem usable and relevant in the classroom. After a week of conversation and collaboration, I’m looking forward to reflecting on how I can broaden the way I think about our collection and its use, and how I can encourage faculty and students on campus to do the same. Hopefully, I can find some angles to entice classes in unexpected areas of study to pay us a visit.

Finally, after going on way to long, I’ll leave you with two more images (no, not me washing butter–but a picture of that DOES exist!). They are two food items vital to the history of food and culinary culture in America and abroad. If you want a bit of my experience from last week, give yourself five minutes to consider them. It might just surprise you how politically charged your morning beverage might be.

A bottle of tea whose label reads “Tea thrown into Boston Harbor Dec 16 1773.”

Unroasted coffee beans taken from the desk of General Ulysses S. Grant.

See you next week, when we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. 🙂

Cora Bolton McBryde’s Cookbook

Some of our readers may know (and some of you may not) that Special Collections has a second blog. Launched in January 2014, it highlights materials from all of our collecting areas and features contributions from all our staff. Last week, our university archivist wrote a post about a handwritten cookbook we acquired last year. It was kept by Cora Bolton McBryde, the wife of Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College president (from 1891-1907), John McLaren McBryde. It’s a very interesting piece of university history AND food history. So this week, our feature comes from our other blog. You can read about the cookbook, its preservation, and a little about the McBrydes here: http://vtspecialcollections.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/cooking-for-the-president-cora-bolton-mcbrydes-cookbook/. Enjoy!

Mark Your Calendars!

There will be a new feature post this week (a little late), but in the meantime, here’s a heads up! Once again, Special Collections will be hosting a series of four (that’s right FOUR!) Open House evenings during the Fall 2013 semester. (See the flyer below.) Among the materials on display will be some more recent additions to the History of Food and Drink Collection. Who knows what we might share! Cocktail publications, handwritten receipt books, corporate pamphlets, and cooking ephemera–it’ll be a surprise! So, even if you’re joined us before, we’ll hope you will consider visiting us again.

Open House events will be on the first Tuesday of every month (September 3, October 1, November 5, and December 3) and will take place from 5pm-7pm. Special Collections is on the first floor of Newman Library, near the study cafe. 

Women’s History Month Profiles, Part 1: Maria Parloa (1843-1909)

March, as some of you may know, is Women’s History Month. While a good portion of what we talk about on this blog relates to women’s history, it seems like a good opportunity to explore the contributions of some authors, educators, and cooks (and sometimes, all three at once!). Each week this month, we’ll share a little about an influential lady from late 19th/early 20th century culinary history. They may not be household names these days (or even in their own time), but their works paved the way for modern home economics, cooking, and cookbooks.

On a side note:  if you’re in the Blacksburg area, we always invite you visit Special Collections. This month, we have two small exhibits devoted to women’s contributions to science, technology, science fiction, architecture, literature, culinary history, and more! You can also go “hands-on” with examples of items in our collection. We’ll also be profiling manuscripts, publications, and items on the Special Collections blog on Tuesdays during March.

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Maria Parloa was born in Massachusetts in 1843. Even before she entered a teacher’s school in Maine in 1871, she had experience cooking in homes and hotels in New England. In 1872, while still in enrolled at the Normal School of the Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield, she published her first cookbook, The Appledore Cookbook (ours is the later 1878 edition).

(Click on any of the images for a larger view.)

1878 edition, The Appledore Cookbook

Index from the 1878 edition, The Appledore Cookbook

Samples pages from the 1878 edition, The Appledore Cookbook

After several years of teaching in Florida, she eventually relocated to Boston, Massachusetts–she had visited several times to lecture and felt there was a gap. By 1877, she opened a cooking school. Two years later, she became one of the first instructors at the famed Boston Cooking School.By 1880, she had authored two more books, First Principles of Household Management and Cookery: A Text-Book for Schools and Families, and Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book: A Guide to Marketing and Cooking.

1880, First Principles of Household Management and Cookery: A Text-Book for Schools and Families

Sample pages from First Principles of Household Management and Cookery: A Text-Book for Schools and Families

Sample introductory pages from First Principles of Household Management and Cookery: A Text-Book for Schools and Families

1880, Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book, A Guide to Marketing and Cooking

Images from Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book, A Guide to Marketing and Cooking

Kitchen appliances from Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book, A Guide to Marketing and Cooking

In 1883, she left her cooking school and Boston for new opportunities in New York City, where she opened a new school. She continued to teach for the next four years before eventually taking more time to write and travel. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, she was prolific, publishing later editions of earlier books, as well as three new ones: Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would Be Good Housekeepers in 1887; Home Economics: A Guide to Household Management in 1889 (we have the 1898 edition); and Miss Parloa’s Young Housekeeper: Designed Especially to Aid Beginners: Economical Receipts for Those Who are Cooking for Two or Three in 1893 (we have the 1895 edition).

1887, Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would be Good Housekeepers

Index pages from Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would be Good Housekeepers

Lunch planning tips from Index pages from Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would be Good Housekeepers

1898, Home Economics: A Guide to Household Management, Including the Proper Treatment of the Materials Entering into the Construction and Furnishings of the House

Recipes from Home Economics: A Guide to Household Management, Including the Proper Treatment of the Materials Entering into the Construction and Furnishings of the House

Kitchen plan from Home Economics: A Guide to Household Management, Including the Proper Treatment of the Materials Entering into the Construction and Furnishings of the House

1895, Miss Parloa’s Young Housekeeper: Designed Especially to Aid Beginners: Economical Receipts for Those Who are Cooking for Two or Three

List of kitchen needs from Miss Parloa’s Young Housekeeper: Designed Especially to Aid Beginners: Economical Receipts for Those Who are Cooking for Two or Three

Invalid recipes from Miss Parloa’s Young Housekeeper: Designed Especially to Aid Beginners: Economical Receipts for Those Who are Cooking for Two or Three

Parloa was among the nation’s first home economics instructors and her focus was broad. She was also one of the first to embrace/promote a brand. Last summer, we acquired One Hundred Ways to Use Liebig Company’s Extract of Beef: A Guide for American Housewives, published in 1897. Parloa also endorsed and created publications for Walter Baker Chocolate in the 1890s.

1897, One Hundred Ways to Use Liebig Company’s Extract of Beef: A Guide for American Housewives

Title page from One Hundred Ways to Use Liebig Company’s Extract of Beef: A Guide for American Housewives

Index from One Hundred Ways to Use Liebig Company’s Extract of Beef: A Guide for American Housewives

By 1903, Parloa had mostly retired from writing. She moved to Bethel, Connecticut, where she lived until the time of her death in 1909. Maria Parloa was devoted to an all-around home economics education, as her book titles and the contents suggest. In addition to recipes, she featured directions for maintaining a clean and orderly home, thriftiness, hygiene, and temperance. She worked to provide a wider education in household management, caring for the home and family, and cooking techniques, and she was an important influence in the rise of home economics.

Special Collections’ Rare Book Collection includes 10 of Maria Parloa’s books. You can see a list of our holdings here: http://tinyurl.com/mariaparloa-vtsc. A New York Times description of one of her classes, published in 1882, is available online. A lengthier biography is available on the website of the Bethel Public Library, which began with a donation from Parloa.

Next week, we’ll look at another important figure in the Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer. Until then, be sure your pantry is organized and your luncheons are simple!

Locating History of Food & Drink Collection Materials

Each week, Special Collections shares an item or two from the History of Food & Drink Collection with you. We keep showing you all this cool stuff, but we haven’t spent much time showing you how to locate materials from our collections yourself! This Wednesday is a diversion into a library catalog and finding aids tutorial, with an eye toward the History of Food & Drink Collection.

The University Libraries have a traditional catalog, Addison (fun fact: it’s named for the first registered student of VAMC in 1872, William Addison Caldwell), as well as a discovery system that searches the catalog and a number of other integrated resources, called Summon. Since the descriptions of materials in the History of Food & Drink Collection are located either in the library catalog or the finding aid database, Virginia Heritage, we’re going to save Summon for another day.

The easiest way to search for culinary materials in Addison is to check out the advanced search: http://addison.vt.edu/#form8. To pull up a list of all the items in the collection, located both in Special Collections and throughout Newman Library, you’ll want to search note fields for “Culinary collection.” (You can click on any of the images throughout the post to see a larger version.)

Once you hit “Search,” you’ll get a list of all the books and manuscript collections in the History of Food & Drink Collection! Caution: They’ll be more than 3600…. But if you’re looking for something more specific, trying putting a keyword or two in the second box above (the first one labeled “Any Field”). If you’re only interested in what we have in Special Collections, you can select “Special Collections” from the “Limit to:” box. The search below, for example, would pull culinary books in Special Collections with “Betty Crocker” somewhere in the record.

If you’re only interested in publications from a certain time period, try using the publication date fields to limit a search. Or if you’re only interested in books, you can scroll down the “Material type” field, locate “Books,” and highlight it.

When it comes to locating materials in specific subcollections, Addison can help with that, too. We have two subcollections that we are making a concerted effort to label within catalog records: the Ann Hertzler Children’s Cookbook and Nutrition Literature Collection and the new Cocktail History Collection. Books and manuscripts from these subcollections will be labeled as part of the History of Food & Drink Collection, but they’ll have an extra note, too. If you’d like to see the more than 400 titles in the Hertzler collection, search “ann hertzler childrens” in the note field. If you’re interested in cocktails, search “cocktail history” in the note field.

As for manuscript collection relating to food history, we’ve been working hard to build up our holdings. To date, we have more than 30 collections of personal and professional papers, handwritten receipt books, and advertising/promotional materials. And there’s more to be processed! We write finding aids (collection guides) for our manuscript collections and contribute them to state-wide consortia. The easiest way to learn about our manuscripts is through this site, Virginia Heritage: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/search?smode=simple.

On the main search page, simply search for “History of Food and Drink” (this is our own subject heading that we include in the finding aid text) and be sure to limit the search to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Or don’t, and see what other culinary goodies are hiding across Virginia (though you may want to try a more general keyword search, since other institutions won’t be using our subject term)!

We hope this helps you a little bit, whether you have research in mind, or you just want to satisfy your curiosity. And if you have questions or problems, you can always contact us! That’s what we’re here for and we’re always glad to help you locate books, collections, and other tidbits in Special Collections.

Happy searching! And stay tuned for a second post later this week. A brand new exciting book arrived while this post  was in progress and we can’t wait a whole week to share!

Happy Birthday To Us!

On this date last year, we launched What’s Cookin’ @Special Collections?! We weren’t sure what to expect, but it sure has been a great first year. We hope you’re enjoying it and we hope you’re still helping us spread the word–we have LOTS more to share!

A Tale of Two Covers, or, Why I Love My Job

About two weeks ago, I was hunting through the catalog to see if we had a copy of a book up for sale. To my surprise, I turned up not only one copy of The Mary Frances Cook Book or Adventures Among the Kitchen People from 1912, but two. Even more surprising was the discovery that our two copies, printed the same year and with same text, had completely different covers and only one included a frontis piece!

The first two images above are the different covers, the first done by Jane Allen Boyer and the other by Margaret G. Hays. The third image is frontis piece that only appears in copy 2. Jane Eayre Fryer’s book is a combination cookbook/storybook (more on that later) that tells the tale of Mary Frances learning to cook and bake from a book created for her by her mother, all with a little help from the pots, pans, and tools in the kitchen.

There are lots of great pictures in this book, but the post today will be a little less about the content (I’ll let the images speak for themselves) and more about using publication to show the challenges and surprises of working with diverse food history collection. I guess, in part, I’m taking an opportunity for me, archivist/blogger Kira, to share some of the small reasons I’m passionate about Special Collections and the History of Food & Drink Collection in particular. I hope you’ll forgive my self-indulgence and read on…

“You never know what you’re going to get”

When a new book or collection arrives, despite conversations with donors and booksellers, something it likely going to catch you off guard.  After 3 1/2 years, I’m always making new discoveries–finding two copies of The Mary Frances Cook Book  is a wonderful example. And those discoveries almost always lead to a little research. When I took the two copies from the shelf and noticed the different covers, but the same publication date, I was intrigued. I like a good Scooby-Doo style archives mystery. A little WorldCat searching revealed at least three different cover titles: “Mary Frances’ First Cook Book, Adventures Among the Kitchen People,” “The Mary Frances Cook Book, Adventures Among the Kitchen People,” and “Easy Steps in Cooking for Big and Little Girls, or Adventures among the Kitchen People.” This last apparently has a different title on the title page, too: Easy Steps in Cooking; or, Mary Frances Among the Kitchen People. At this point, I don’t have a solid answer, but I suspect all the variation lies in the fact that the book was privately printed in at least three locations. The involvement of two illustrators, too, could account for different cover art. And since I can’t let a mystery alone, I’ll post an update when I have one!

A wealth of hidden connections

The Mary Frances Cook Book or Adventures Among the Kitchen People includes contributions from two illustrators. The page decorations and small images were done by Jane Allen Boyer, as was the cover from copy 2 above. The full pages illustrations and the cover image from copy 1 above were completed by Margaret G. Hays. For our long-time followers, this name might sound familiar. Margaret G. Hays was the author of the 1911 Vegetable Verselets, a book featured on the blog last spring that even inspired a musical event here on campus! Vegetable Verselets was illustrated by Grace Wiederseim, Hays’ sister. (Wiederseim’s influence on her sister’s illustrations a year later is easy to see.) Wiederseim, later Grace Drayton, was the creator of the Campbell Kids. Just a little food art trivia that makes the world a little bit smaller!

On the one hand, many of the publications and manuscripts here in Special Collections are related. That’s part of the reason we collect them. Helping a researcher find papers relating to a family member four generations previous or reminding someone of their mother’s kitchen growing up because we have the same cookbook on display seem like little things that happen in the line of duty. On the other hand, I find satisfaction in the resolution of other people’s mysteries, alongside those I come across in my work processing collections.

Crossing formats, genres, and collecting areas

In many ways, this relates to my point above about making connections.  The Mary Frances Cook Book or Adventures Among the Kitchen People is a cookbook. It’s meant to be a first cookbook for young girls. In addition, it’s a storybook. There is a clear educational narrative connecting the recipes as Mary Frances learns about the kitchen. In addition to both of these things, we might even consider this a household manual. Mary Frances is playing the substitute mother role, at least as it relates to the kitchen. Over the course of her adventures, she learns not only how to cook and bake, but how having that role in the home relates to other (future) domestic roles. This publication doesn’t fit only into the Ann Hertzler Children’s Cookbook and Nutrition Literature Collection. It relates to topics in the larger History of Food & Drink Collection, as well.

Although we are limited in the areas we are actively collecting materials here in Special Collections, the overlapping and interweaving of seemingly disparate fields of knowledge is forever revealing itself. Earlier this year, we acquired the letter of a Civil War soldier, written to his wife from a parole camp. Of the eight pages, most of it is consumed by the soldier’s descriptions of the limited (and sometimes barely edible) food he ate during his time as a POW. If he wrote to his wife at all during his imprisonment, his letters would have been heavily censored. Yet, among his first opportunities to write her unrestricted, his focus is food–perhaps a reminder of just how essential it is in our lives. (And yes, I plan to feature the letter on the blog as soon as I can get it processed.)

Sometimes the connections are obvious–Robert Taylor Preston’s correspondence, while usually considered part of our local history materials, relates also to the Civil War and the founding of Virginia Agricultural & Mechanical College and the university’s history.  At other times, it may not be quite as clear–it isn’t until you look inside the 1960s cooperative extension publication on kitchen cabinetry that you might connect it to the International Archives of Women in Architecture, when you realize it was authored by a woman.

My point to all this is that materials here never fit into a single category or collecting area, which I find to be an amazing observation. It means answering a reference question or putting together a display is never straight-forward. The more we think outside the box, the more creative an answer we can provide or exhibit we can share with all of you.

I’ve created a much larger post than I expected and it in the higgledy-piggledy of last week, it’s been a bit delayed, but I should be back on schedule this week. (“Higgledy-piggledy,” one of my favorite 19th and early 20th century expressions, actually appears in our feature book, by the way!) I hope, once again, you’ll forgive my diversion. More importantly, as the one year anniversary of “What’s Cookin’ @ Special Collections?!” approaches (how time flies), I hope a post like this gives you a little insight into why I’m here, why the blog is here, and just why I love this project and my job.

Thanks for reading.

Farm and Rural Cooking: The Orange Judd Cookbook

The Orange Judd Cook Book , published in 1914, has a subtitle that describes it rather succinctly:  “A Practical Collection of Tested Recipes for Practical Housekeepers.” Beyond that, it was largely intended for rural and farm homes and housekeepers.

Given its early 20th century publication date, the lack of color images isn’t surprising. Still, each picture does present a perfectly created and plated dish, even if some of it is *gulp* jellied. (I know I have serious doubts I could cheese cakes that nice looking on the first try–pastry crusts and I, for example, are old enemies.) And it makes the important point that plating and presentation have always been a factor in serving and eating.

Adeline O. Goessling, the author, wrote a number of related books between 1901 and 1919, including Making the Farm Kitchen Pay, Farm and Home Cook Book and Housekeeper’s Assistant, and The Farm and Home Cook Book: A Practical Collection of Tested Recipes for Practical Housekeepers. It seems safe to say, when it came to authoring cookbooks, Ms. Goessling found her niche and an effective way to package and repackage titles and recipes!

With the emphasis on rural and farm life, the cookbook isn’t without a few recipes that might make a modern reader look twice. We’ve looked before at recipes for various mock and real sea creatures, organ meats, and alternative sources of meat (squirrel, for example). The Orange Judd Cook Book is the first recipes we’ve seen in our collection for raccoon (baked, of course!). Not only are there directions for preparing it, but a rationale as to why raccoon would be good for eating and how to not waste the fat you don’t want to bake it with–by making soap. This lead to more than one discussion in the library about what raccoon would actually taste like and exactly how strong a scent you would need in that soap to not smell like a gamey animal. (Why yes, we librarians and archivists are a fun bunch!) The fact that “Baked Coon” is immediately followed by “Possum and Sweet ‘Taters'” led to discussions of how different the environments we were raised in can be.

Which brings our post this week to a close with this thought: cookbooks can spark cultural conversation and education in any environment, even if its only the shared experience of wonder at a new food or recipe.

Oh, and while Special Collections at Virginia Tech does not have any of Adeline Goessling’s other publications, you can The Orange Judd Cook Book and several others online via the Internet Archive.