FOOD/Cookbooks
Cranberry-Cashew Salad made
the cut for New Albany Cooking
with Friends thanks to an exotic
mango-curry flavor and
crunchy texture.
New Albany Cooking
with Friends
(248 pages; $29.95) New
Albany, Ohio—This
cooking club project took
regional honors in the
2007 Tabasco Community
Cookbook Awards. We
love the special-occasion
recipes from local chefs
and club members, but
the book is a special
keepsake thanks to
watercolor art by Ohio
illustrator George
Acock that’s splashed
throughout (614/775-
9114; nacookingwith
friends.com).
Debbie, who still searches for copies of the book to give to friends. “It’s a wonderful way to recon- nect with the past and a deeper way of sharing recipes than just pulling them off the Internet.” Attachment comes easily with community cookbooks because they are, by nature, personal. A group of folks bands together for the love of a cause—a church, the local fire department, a school, family. Intimate scraps of info share pages with old-favorite recipes that contributors know by heart. Those recipes and their ingredients tell stories of time and place. Any respectable Midwest-specific cookbook, for example, must show off the bounty of our fields, lakes and backyard gardens. Especially a decade or two after publication, it becomes clear: These are not merely cookbooks. They are focused, candid snapshots of a community seen through its food. If anyone can validate these cookbooks’ his- toric role, it’s Jan Longone, curator of American culinary history at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library. A former dealer of antique cu- linary books, she was on a first-name basis with food legends including Julia Child and James Beard. Jan donated her thousands of early-Amer- ican cookbooks to the Clements Library, creating a premier archive for the study of American culinary history (for information on the cook- book collection: clements.umich.edu/culinary). The collection includes what Jan says is the very first charity cookbook. A group of Philadelphia-based Yankee ladies assembled A Poetical Cook-Book in 1864, raising money to sup- port Civil War efforts. The concept immediately took off, and by the time the century turned, community cookbooks had been published in early every state. They gave women both busi- ness skills and a voice in their own communi- ties, as well as in major U.S. events. “If a woman said to her husband, ‘I’m going to a suffragette meeting,’ there would’ve been a prob- lem,” Jan says. “If she said, I’m going to meet with my friends and write a cookbook,’ that was OK.” In the old days, book contents were hand- delivered to a local printer, such as Morris Press, which opened in downtown Kearney, Nebraska, back in 1933. After nearly 50 years of business, Morris took on cookbooks as a specialty. Today, Morris Press Cookbooks is the nation’s top com- munity cookbook publisher; over 10,000 groups annually order a few hundred books each, re- sulting in millions of cookbooks in all 50 states.
Midwest Living October 2009 42
