Broadcasting February 24th 2012
Winthrop Room
Day 2
Community Cookbooks: Historical, Literary, Digital
Anne Bower, Alison Kelly, Sandra Oliver, Ann Romines
The way community cookbooks are created and accessed or used changes from century to century, yet this cookbook form, from its inception during the Civil War to the present, continues to both reflect and shape the communities in which it exists. Scholars (and others) exploring community cookbooks can discover within them the values, historical milieu, culinary and social customs affecting the cookbooks’ makers, as well as the diverse methods each cookbook’s contributors employ to reach out to a community (real, virtual, or imagined). Panelists’ topics will include: Discovering Community Cookbooks in the Library of Congress; Coast to Coast, Cover to Cover: Community Cookbooks as Historical Resources; and Creating Literary and Culinary Communities: The Cather Foundation Cookbook.
What is a Recipe
Andy Coe, Cathy Kaufman, Laura Schenone, Barbara Wheaton
What is a recipe? Is it a memory, a story, a way of life? Is it a formula for self-improvement, a promise of good health, a lesson in culinary technique? Recipes often don’t live up to their expectation, but our hunger for them never seems wane. For this reason, recipes continue to be a source of commerce, profit, and endless fascination. This panel will explore recipes from the age of cuneiform tablets to our current (and pilfering) Internet era. We will especially look at the recipe as an information system that relies on shared assumptions between recipe writer and user–creating either disappointment or triumph.
Cookbooks from Mars, Cookbooks from Venus
Michael Krondl, Charlotte Druckman, Priscilla Ferguson, Barbara Haber
Historically, cookbooks have been written by men and women, for men or women. Just what form they took was typically determined by the gender of both the writer and the intended audience. Compare the kind of books written by Escoffier and Mrs. Beeton, or for that matter by chefs like Thomas Keller and contemporary lifestyle gurus like Martha Stewart. The sex of writer’s voice still matters.
Are Cookbooks Scholarship? University Press Food Lists
Jennifer Crewe, Elaine Maisner, Kate Marshall, Bruce Kraig
Several university presses have food lists, some of them focusing on food history, some on regional cuisine, including cookbooks. Sometimes books in this field are a bit removed from the scholarly works that form the backbone of a university press list. How do the presses, and their faculty approval boards, look at these lists? What is different about publishing a cookbook or a food history book with a university press? Our panel includes two editors at university presses with established food lists, and a series editor whose list is published at a university press.
About the Author: OskVifilsdottir
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