recipes

"The University of Texas at San Antonio is currently working to bring diverse perspectives on Mexican cuisine together for a global audience. Taking a digitized collection of 2,000 Mexican cookbooks, archivists at the UTSA Libraries Special Collections are compiling recipes into a series of three cookbooks they’re calling Recetas: Cooking in the Time of Coronavirus. "

Liberate the Soup Joumou! Why Haitians Care

Painting by Nicole Jean Louis

I know Kimberly Voss at University of Central Florida has worked on cookbooks and food writers/editors in 20th-century America; I wonder if she is familiar with the secondary literature on personal recipe collections.

I have in my possession a recipe box with recipes and household hints collected by a Madison, WI woman, in the years between 1910 and 1947.  Does anyone know of any articles that discuss similar collections?  Please respond to this blog or my email: rdapple@wisc.edu

 Look forward to hearing more about such 20th-century collecti

+1 to what Andrew wrote--and definitely thanks for highlighting these texts! An important aspect of the cultural context here is textual tradition. If an well-known authority (medical or religious) had written that a particular food or drug was a useful cure, that becomes "truth." Even such substances were/are not particularly efficacious from a physiological standpoint, it was easier to come up with a reason why it didn't work in a particular instance rather than to decide the long-standing belief was false or the authority was wrong.

Thanks for sharing, Gerard! To your question, I would hesitate to define efficacy in terms of modern ideas about healthful diets. While it is surely true that correcting some dietary deficiency would likely have been perceived as efficacious, understanding of what "works" is heavily influenced by social and cultural context and, perhaps not surprisingly, is also deeply personal or individualized (i.e., what works for *me* may not be what works for someone else).