Posts tagged with American Culinary History

The William L. Clements Library; the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center; and the U.S. at 250 program invite you to join a three-part series titled "Drinking the Revolution," exploring the role of beverages in Revolutionary America and the Early Republic. The first lecture will take place on Thursday, Jan. 22nd, 4-5:30pm in the Hatcher Gallery. Join us in person or via zoom.

In Special Collections, our books don’t leave the building, but sometimes the recipes sneak out for a trip to the kitchen. Last week, the U-M Library Art Alliance, the William L. Clements Library, and the Special Collections Research Center teamed up with Student Life Sustainability for a small, hands-on staff event, where we brought two nineteenth century cookie recipes to 21st century tastebuds. 

Miss Parloa was a household name in late 19th century America. As the author of numerous well-known cookbooks, teacher of cooking schools in Boston and New York, and the domestic editor for The Ladies’ Home Journal, Maria Parloa rose far above the obscurity of her origins as an orphan and domestic servant. Her recipe for fried apples is a winner, especially if you can obtain Northern Spy apples!

Join the Book Arts Studio and the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive for a pop-up printing event in the Shapiro Gallery on Tuesday, Oct. 28th, from 4-5pm.

The Drinking Man’s Diet Cookbook by photographer Robert Cameron, offered a high-protein & hight-fat fad diet, essentially premised on the idea that eating dense calories offered satiation, while allowing space for carbohydrates in wine or cocktails. In the chapter on bread, Cameron suggests this recipe for Avocado Toast.

Popular culture depictions of the “roaring twenties” often focus on speakeasies and illicit cocktail consumption. However, as prohibition (1920-1933) pushed alcoholic beverages into shadowy corners, soft drinks took center stage in cookbooks for home cooks and party hostesses. This month’s recipe comes from Add-a-Leaf Hostess Book (1926) by Betty Beldon, in collaboration with Ida Bailey Allen.

Join us next Thursday, 19 December between 4-6p for our final Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!

Guest post by Nathalie Ross, Heid Fellow, on her research in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Nathalie is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of North Texas, specializing in Jewish Food Studies. 

Join us on Thursday, 11 May 3-5 pm for a panel honoring the impact of collector, donor, and adjunct curator Janice B. Longone (1933-2022) through her work building the renowned Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive (JBLCA). The JBLCA encompasses more than 25,000 items including 19th and early 20th century cookbooks, charity cookbooks, immigrant cookbooks, food-related advertising ephemera, and restaurant menus.

Cookbooks can reveal so much about the time in which they were written through their recipes and their authors. For instance, many cookbooks were written for a particular audience, most often women because historically they were the ones cooking or keeping up in the kitchen. In the 20th century, more and more cookbooks were published that sought to bring cuisines of the world to American housewives. The Chinese-Japanese cookbook (1914) is an early example of one.