Suffragette City

Before I am accused of false advertising, permit me to clarify that this post is not about a visit to the Clements by the estimable Mr. David Bowie. Rather, it concerns a visit with a small handful of students, the other week, and a few books, with which I had occasion to better my acquaintance.

On Tuesday, I heard that three or four students would be coming in on Thursday for a bit of an orientation. The course which occasioned this is fondly known as American Studies Bootcamp, and the idea of such a visit is that the students get an introduction to the Clements as a repository of primary source material, and to consulting a curator, and to mining information out of the possibly surprising places.  Cookbooks, for instance.

Curator, I said. Eeep, that’s me, I said.

Their professor asked that they get a chance to work with the kind of materials found in our web exhibit The Old Girl Network: Charity Cookbooks and the Empowerment of Women. (Accompanying talk here)

The idea, in a nutshell, is that women, as volunteers for charities and other causes, built up experience in conducting enterprises and political campaigns, and so learned ways to act in, and on, the wider world.  They did this, in many cases, while still sticking to the safety of socially approved “Women’s Concerns,” and while engaging in uncontroversial projects like publishing cookbooks. Also, as in the suffrage  and temperance cookbooks, one sees elements of the female sphere, as then constructed,  showing reflections of political activity

After a couple of entirely enjoyable hours reviewing the possibilities, I settled on a number of Suffrage and WCTU cookbooks to show them, as well as a manual, about which more in a moment.  I sat them down with the books and presented this challenge:

“What information can you find in these, about the lives of the women they belonged to…besides what recipes they had available to them?”

They had, as it turned out, worksheets to complete: I didn’t get a good look at them, but the assignment was to find the stories that could be told, so my question for them (fortunately!) fell right into line.  They were a diligent bunch, and had questions to ask about the materials in their hands.

It was a blast

The best question, I think, on the face of it was about one thing, but actually contained a critique of the whole project of a book. The student was examining The expert waitress:  a manual for the pantry, kitchen, and dining-room by Anne Frances Springsteed, from 1898.  The work is dedicated to the young ladies of the Columbia Club, with the affection of the author.  It’s a book of advice for women in service in private homes, treating not only of the tricks and requirements of the trade, but also of deportment, and one’s attitude about one’s work.

The student’s question was where we had gotten the work – had it come from a publisher? For someone’s home?   Easily enough answered if that was the real question…which it wasn’t. The real question was…who had read this? Did anyone, in 1898 or any other time,  read books like this?

It’s a good question. Some portion of the interest of the work, as an historical artifact, is that it opens up more questions than it answers.  The author’s stated intent is that it be of use to such young ladies of the Columbia Club, and their peers, who may happen to find employment in domestic service.  It does not, however, seem to be written from experience doing such work. Did the author draw on her experience as an employer? Was part of the projected readership employers who would wish to know how to instruct their servants?  The author’s voice is encouraging, not to say exhortatory, and from numerous little asides about making oneself valuable, the general burden seems to be “this is how to thrive in your position, this is how to get ahead, this is how to succeed.”  Near the end of the book, in “Miscellaneous Instructions” we find talk of the dignity of a profession:

A waitress with good health, a fair amount of brains, and a determination to be a better waitress than any woman was before, has a great field before her. But if she aspires to raise waiting to the dignity of a profession, she must study; she must educate her eye to know the difference between a line that is exactly straight and one that is slightly askew; she must train her memory until the daily  routine is perfectly easy and she can give thought to decoration and invention; she must educate her hands until they are to be trusted with the care of the frailest glass and china, and educate her sense of smell and of taste until she can suit each salad dressing to the  dinner of which it forms a part, making it  rich or piquant, as the other dishes demand.

Emphasis mine.

And at the end there is section called “A Servant’s Contract” which is equally full of advice, some of which has, to the modern ear, a certain ring of condescension.

If published today, it would probably be a “For Dummies” book, and what are historians going to make of those in a hundred years?

A revised edition, from 1911, may be inspected here

Two remarkable things, in the Suffrage vein, were a party plan, and a satire phrased in recipe form.

The satire is found in the book which gave the students the richest vein to mine: The suffrage cook book compiled by Mrs. L.O. Kleber, published in 1915. Besides recipes from assorted Suffrage notables, and miscellaneous celebrities, there are letters of support from various elected officials, whether heartfelt or opportunistic.  And there is this charming recipe

Anti’s Favorite Hash

(Unless you wear dark glasses you cannot make a success of Anti’s Favorite Hash.)

1 Ib. truth thoroughly mangled

1 generous handful of injustice.

(Sprinkle over everything in the pan)

1 tumbler acetic acid (well shaken)

A little vitriol will add a delightful tang and a string of nonsense should be dropped in at the last as if by accident.

Stir all together with a sharp knife because some of the tid bits will be tough propositions.

The work itself, in a choice of formats (text, pdf, or djvu) can be read here

And, finally for a glimpse at Suffrage in the vernacular imagination of the day, we have suggestions for “A Suffrage Sociable.”  Now, Suffrage Sociables seem to have been a known phenomenon, social events promoting solidarity, fund-raising, and what we would now call consciousness-raising. A spoof on the institution occurs in The book of parties and pastimes by Mary Dawson and Emma Paddock Telford, published in 1912.

The party plan is reproduced here in its entirety, gay careless peppy tone, gender-role switching, and all

A little recent history

Seems a kind of solecism, an error of number, has crept into this blog, and right in the very first post, too.

I said, on the maiden voyage…..
“This curatorship is a brand new position, possibly the first of its kind”

It has been pointed out to me, both nonymously and otherwise, that this is inaccurate in the spirit, however careful in the letter.  What is true is that this is, as far as we know, the first Full Time and Funded such Position – a FTE in the parlance of the great administrative engines that drive our the large enterprises of our world. I say “As far as we know” in hopes that, if someone chancing to read this paragraph knows of a previous instance of same, we will soon hear of it.

This is not to say, however, that this is new for the Clements — there has been a Culinary Curator at the Clements lo these ten years.  The original announcement may be seen here.

Therefore this correction notice is one of my favorite kind….the kind with a story behind it.

How this collection came to be

First, I have the pleasure of introducing to these pages the current and original Culinary Curator, the founder of the feast: Janice Bluestein Longone.

I was careful to ask Jan if I could mention her in these pages, but of course if you google “Jan Longone” you get nearly 4500 hits, so her appearance here is hardly anything worth remarking on.  You’ll find encomia to Jan and her work scattered all over the web – such as this recent typical, telling, and bacon-savored tribute

Typically, her response was “Yes yes, but don’t write about me, write about the collection.”  Still, a bit of background is in order:

Jan officially became Curator in 2000, and she subsequently donated a large swath of her personal collection of cookbooks (and related materials, a very large “&c”) to the Clements, adding to what was already there

The Clements already has a splendid collection of classic American cookbooks,” says Longone. “Their holdings include the first American cookbook (Amelia Simmons’ ‘American Cookery’ – 1796), the first Black authored household manual (Robert Roberts’ ‘House Servant’s Directory’ – 1827), the earliest Jewish American cookbook (Mrs. Levy’s ‘Jewish Cookery Book’ – 1871), and the first book on New Orleans cookery (‘Creole Cookery Book,’ edited by the Christian Woman’s Exchange of New Orleans – 1885). In addition, the Clements’ diverse collection of manuscript and published materials, including diaries, herbals, letters, exploration and medical chronicles, all serve as prime resource for culinary scholars.
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2000/Feb00/r020800b

However,  she had been volunteering (per her memory, of which I’m frankly in awe) for a good ten years before that, lending her expertise in the matter of culinary-and-related materials.

And the source of that expertise?  The experience of running what is now the country’s oldest Culinary and Gastronomic book dealership. To quote a 1996 catalog “The Wine and Food Library, an antiquarian bookshop founded in 1973, is devoted solely to books and related materials (antique menus and advertising pamphlets, engravings and journals) on the pleasures of the table and the cellar.”

I read about Jan’s bookstore in a food magazine, before I took off for school…indeed, it was a strong persuasion in favor of UM. The article mentioned her remarkable collection of charity cookbooks and I made a mental note to get in touch once I got to Ann Arbor.

Little did I know!

But wait, you say….any dealer is likely to have a collection, but so what? Cookbook publishing, Gastronomic and Oenophilic publishing, are wide and international. How did this particular dealer come to amass a collection explicitly suitable to the Clements, with its focus on the history of America?

In case it’s not clear from what I’ve said already, Jan is a Woman with a Vision. After a certain point in her career, she was also a Woman on a Mission. Her interest in food history materials (paired neatly with her husband Dan’s in works on wine) took on an American focus in the early 80’s

At The Oxford Symposium

As Jan tells the story, the moment of realization came at a seminar on food history in Oxford in 1980 – one of the seminars that would shortly be formalized as the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery

Jan had been asked to give a talk on the history of American cookbooks.  Her topic was met, it seems, with a certain skepticism. I’ll give it to you in Jan’s own words…

My extremely sophisticated and international audience, however, was somewhat incredulous that I would speak on such topics. They said America had no cuisine or culinary history to speak of: all we ate were hamburgers.  Well, having prepared for the lecture, I knew they were wrong.

(from The Quarto, published by the Clements Library Associates, No. 23, Spring-Summer 2005)

Interestingly, this echoes a question asked at another gathering of folk from many nations:

In 1876…foreign visitors to the American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia asked, `Have you no national dishes?’
“That same question was still being asked of us 100 years later,” says Janice (Jan) Longone. “We knew the answer was a resounding yes! Thus, we built this collection.”
http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/04/Fall04/story.html?cooking

Skipping over much of interest and import (including a series of ground-breaking exhibitions) the upshot here is that the collection was built to contribute to the documentation of American Culinary History, considered with an eye that sweeps very broadly, taking in “everything that influenced or influences America and everything that America influenced or influences in culinary matters.”

What exactly is in the collection?  Well, I had the privilege of sitting with Jan as she spoke with a bookseller, recently, and made a little list

• Cookbooks, of course, both the seminal works of cookery that shaped the cooking America inherited (and influenced what culinary publishing was to become,) and the productions of American presses throughout the 18th & 19th centuries, and on into the 20th.
• Especially representative regional cookbooks, and works from the multitude of ethnic communities in the US; so, culinary works in all languages and of all nationalities, when published in the US
• Charity and community cookbooks from any US community
• Works meant for the professional as well as the home kitchen, including restaurant and hotel manuals as well as those for institutional and military food operations.
• But also “whole house” books and works in the Domestic Arts, treating of the care of the household, home doctoring, entertaining, childrearing, etc; plus books on marketing and markets, and tradesmen’s directories.
• Works on gastronomy and consumption.
• Works on beverages, both the coffee/tea/chocolate realm, and works on the making, or consumption and delectaion, of wine, beer, cider, and spirituous liquors.
• Ephemera: Menus, advertising materials (for tools and equipment as well as foodstuffs,) and promotional pamphlets and give-away publications from food processors.
• Cookery and domestic arts periodicals
• Anything treating of new world foodstuffs: maize, chocolate, the new world beans and squashes, the tomato, etc.

Plus sundry related materials not included in my notes.

This is, you will say, more than culinary history. It is.  Our collecting interests take in culinary history’s implications, and what it is implied by, tending towards a particular slice of food history, and food in history: American history from the point of view of food production, preparation, and consumption.

For more on the vision and the mission:

3 video clips

Out of the Blue episode

American cooking from A-Z

An ingredients list of news releases

And that almost scratches the surface.  Next time, an addendum to apple snow.

In which the new blog muses on itself

What this blog is for

I describe myself as narrative hound. I love stories, think in stories, honor stories’ ability to make data handle-able, and see stories everywhere I look. One thing this blog allows me to do is share the stories I find as I explore the collection it’s going to be my privilege to curate. I know those will be ambushing me from sundry directions, asking to be told.

But there are also three journeys of discovery and learning that will be going on here:
First, the grand adventure of becoming a curator
Second, learning the collection.
Third, discovering and promoting the uses of the collection.

So, you know, not much.

For the first, well, I’ve been a number of things, including a restaurateur, a librarian, and a cartoon character, but being a curator is new territory. I’m not bumbling in quite blind, but oh how many instructive stumblings and whackings of my head against the unanticipated there will be.

This is also a personal journey from Stove to Shelf.  People often express surprise that I went from cook to librarian….I’ve taken to comforting them my referring to it as my  non-obvious transition. It’s not surprising from the inside: what I said on my grad school applications was that after a certain point in my career I realized I was dealing as much with information as with food.

That may not be the most useful way to put it, though.

Twenty years as a culinary professional meant I spent a lot of time interacting with cooks and diners, which made me very aware of how people talk about food (the fact that I grew up reading cookbooks might just possibly have something to do with this, too.)  One thing I came to see was how much we eat, so to speak, with our brains.

What I mean by this is that our sensibilities, along with our taste buds, are constitutive of our palates – ideas, memories, prejudices, associations…all come into determining what we relish.

But wait, there’s more….sensibilities, I believe, come into it again.  Our sensibilities about food, plus our palates, plus our vocabularies, make up our experience of dining.

Vocabularies?  Oh, you bet. I mean the vocabularies people have for describing foodstuffs and dining experiences to themselves.  Is that snapper burnt, or is it blackened? That Gymsock Cheese my roommate used berate me for having in the fridge — you know a menu would vaunt its “assertive truffle-y nose.”  One person’s Richly Sweet is another person’s Cloying. Are you a picky or a discriminating eater? A purist, or a lacking in gastronomic imagination?  You know how these characterizations just will fly about.

The upshot, for me, is that the terms we use with ourselves and with each other help make up the way we encounter the world….including the world on our plates. Making a slight leap to how these terms and characterizations get there in the first place (via upbringing, background, social position along numerous vectors, all as frames for personal experience) we get this: how people talk about food, cooking and eating is interesting for the cultural information it contains and the cultural phenomena it illuminates.  You could say I’m interested in food-talk as text.

That’s the Very Short version, on which I look forward to elaborating considerably as I go along. Small wonder, then, that I’m interested in cookbooks as texts – a vast deal goes into your typical cookbook that situates the author, text, and audience in milieu as well as time and place.  Quite interesting one cookbook at a time…but how much more interesting when you have a whole collection!

Soundbite: a collection of historic cookbooks (et al) is an unselfconscious repository of social history

Second, the voyage of exploration which is learning the collection. I expect the first pass at this will occupy the next 3 years, at least.  Can your hear that sound? That’s me rubbing my hands in glee.

There’s the culinary collection proper (about which more here) with cookery books from as early as the 16th century, plus food-related ephemera in the form of menus, promotional and souvenir cookbooks, and advertising material. And then there are a raft of community cookbooks, and hotel-and-restaurant-and-travel materials. Most of the materials are American in origin, but the collection includes European works that contributed to the formation of cuisine and culinary sensibility in America.

But that’s not all there is to it. There’s much else at the Clements with something to tell us about food, cooking, and eating:

[takes a deep breath before beginning the recitation]

The Manuscript Collections include manuscript cookbooks, as well as letters and diaries with discussions of food in daily life.

The Map Collections show trade routes, agricultural production, and food manufacture; and map cartouches and decorative elements include both allegorical and realistic renderings of food, along with its preparation and use.

The Prints and Photographs Collections depict food and dining in photo albums, advertisements, pen and ink illustrations and lithographs.

The holdings of books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals include descriptions and information in city and trade directories; guides for immigrants; military, exploration, and travel accounts; compilations of laws; works of belles lettres; and printed ephemera such as trade cards, advertisements, and instruction manuals.

Third, discovering and promoting the uses of the collection. There’s all this fascinating information to be gleaned from such a collection. What can researchers do with it?  What progressions can be followed, and in service of what investigations into larger historical questions?

How can the potential uses of the collection be most usefully framed? Who will want to know about it, and in what context?    What connections will it be useful to make across the subgenres within the collection? (e.g. works in the Domestic Arts & works on Hotels, where both treat of table service, or table settings.)

Of all the threads that can be followed through a chronology of cookbooks (for instance, American cookbooks with female authors, Amelia Simmons to Fannie Farmer,) which will be most useful to pick out and highlight in exhibits or guides to the collection?

This is all very general and just barely indicative, because, well, because the journey has just begun.

But enough of self-reflection. Next time, Apple Snow as it was made in Philadelphia in the latter part of the 18th century

First Catch Your Hare, OR, Here Comes Another Blog

Greetings, readers imagined or otherwise, and welcome to my brand new blog.

So, what’s with the title of this first post?

“First catch your hare” is what Hannah Glasse, author of The Art of Cookery (first published in London, 1747, and much reprinted in Britain and the US through the 18th & early 19th centuries) is famous for saying, but never said.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell, in her 1903 My Cookery Books puts the case as well as anyone could:

If Mrs. Glasse alone survives, it is for one reason only, and that the most unreasonable. Her fame is due not to her genius, for she really had none, but to the fact that her own generation believed there was “no sich a person,” and after generations believed in her as the author of a phrase she never wrote…
…
I have spent hours in pursuit of the famous phrase, or, at least, the reason of the misquotation, in the hope that success might, forever after, link my name with that of Hannah Glasse. But I can come no nearer to the clue than the ” First Case your hare,” found in every cookery book of the period…
…
Well, anyway, believe in Mrs. Glasse, or not, the cookery book that bears her name is the only one published in the eighteenth century now remembered by the whole world.

Yes yes, you say, but what about it?

In just about 2 months, I’ll be starting work as Associate Curator of American Culinary History at the William L. Clements Library.  The Clements, to quote its richly stocked website, “houses original resources for the study of American history and culture from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Its mission is to collect and preserve primary source materials, to make them available for research, and to create an environment that supports and encourages scholarly investigation of our nation’s past.”

Including, as it happens, a collection of cookbooks, cooking periodicals, culinary ephemera, and all manner of associated materials.

This curatorship is a brand new position, possibly the first of its kind, and there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m therefore Embarked on An Adventure.  Should all go as I plan, this blog will be the record of my wanderings through a world filled with things people say about things people eat (and sundry attendant phenomena, hereinafter to be enumerated.)

The story of what Hannah Glasse didn’t say is significant because it’s typical, in a way: too often, Culinary History (and therefore that part of Food Studies) has relied on received stories, on narrative often unsubstantiated or at least undocumented, for lack of organized access to source material…access of exactly the kind this new curatorship is dedicated to providing and promoting.

And yet, history isn’t data.  History may be based on data, but can’t be reduced to it (or to them. Is “data” a collective noun? Stay tuned!) The narrative’s what makes the history accessible, what allows us to make sense of what’s occurred in the near or distant past. So this first post also honors the stories by which Culinary History has thrived, right alongside the value of the elaboration of those stories which is afforded by recourse to primary sources.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

More next time about the narratives and journeys this blog hopes to recount.