American Cookbooks of Community and Place

This book offers an account of the emergence of a popular American publication genre in the 1870s – American cookbooks of community and place – as well as a description of early examples that, while differing in matters of format and scale, exhibited traits in common. A majority of such books were produced locally by women working collaboratively in order to effect some change to the good of their communities. Some were simply celebratory of family and friends, providing a means to shape and preserve shared memories via the medium of print. Drawing on experiences in benevolent organizing dating back to the antebellum era, when it can be shown that a few early cookbooks were sold for charitable purposes, self-organizing groups of women drew on their domestic expertise to translate their cultural capital as moral custodians into something more than what they could achieve as individuals. In some cases, identifications of the compilers enable comparisons of socially authored cookbooks that, while bearing distinctive reminders of community and place, proliferated in differing circumstances almost simultaneously, from Maine to California. Nearly always the compilers of cookbooks of community and place chose to reflect some allegiance to locality, whether local, regional, or national, in the naming of venerated recipes or by circumscribing their means of outreach to contributors. At the same time, the discourse of benevolent voluntarism employed in their prefaces and other paratexts sheds light on the evolving scope of these women’s understandings of neighborliness, community, and place.