Beyond the Reading Room

Visitors to our Fall exhibit Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920s, might be pardoned for questioning whether the 1920s offered anything appealing to the 21st century palate. However, this month’s Recipe of the Month post sets out to prove that you can, indeed, host a Jazz Age party with historically accurate recipes and enjoy your cake (or your jell-o) and eat it, too, with Tomato Canapés (1928) and Raspberry Delight (1927)

Join us at the Special Collections Research Center on Friday, October 23, to celebrate the culmination of a fifteen-year project to catalog the University of Michigan Library’s extraordinary collection of Greek manuscripts.

Join us on Thursday, October 22nd from 4:00-5:30pm in the Hatcher Gallery Event Space for the first Longone Lecture, a biennial lecture series exploring the history of food and drink in the United States. We are delighted to welcome our first speaker, Rebecca Sharpless, Professor of History at Texas Christian University. Dr. Sharpless writes on the intersections of food, women, and work in the American South. This event is hybrid and a zoom link is also available.

Join us this Thursday, October 15th, between 4-6p for our next Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!

Join Curator Juli McLoone on Tuesday, Oct. 13th from 2:00-3:00pm for coffee and conversation on about the exhibit Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920s. Learn more about the books and artifacts featured in the exhibit, the titles that didn’t quite fit into the exhibit cases, and the story of how this exhibit’s narrative took shape. Coffee and tea will be served.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce a new exhibit opening next week on Monday, September 21st -- "Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920's." Join us at 4pm that day for an opening panel discussion featuring three scholars of food history.

Join us this Thursday, September 17th, between 4-6p for our first Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!

Get a sneak peak at SCRC's upcoming Fall exhibit through our August “Recipe of the Month.” Drawn from Meals for Small Families by Jean Mowat, “Cocoa Sticks” epitomizes one of the key themes of the 1920s: an unapologetic use of commercially made and packaged foodstuffs in support of simple & speedy meal preparation.

This month’s recipe offers a preview of Special Collections’ Fall exhibit: Faster and More Fun: American Home Cooking in the 1920s, with Chocolate Blanc Mange from Fun in the Kitchen (1927).

Summer calls for cool drinks and cool eats. This month’s recipe comes from Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1920), third edition, third printing.