Cookbook Politics by Kennan Ferguson

Author:Kennan Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812297126
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Gods’ Foods

The emergence, development, and perpetuation of community cookbooks has long been intertwined with religious identity. The close links between religious identity and eating/food pathways are well recognized: many scholars have written on the importance of eating and ritual in various immigrant and local religious societies.14 It should not be surprising, therefore, that many community cookbooks in the United States (certainly a plurality if not a majority of them) have been compiled by religiously self-identified women’s organizations.15 Indeed, these proved such excellent fundraisers, especially for regional churches, that by mid-century a number of publishers who specialized precisely in community cookbooks had emerged.

Oakland, California, for example, saw at least eleven community cookbooks between 1888 and 1908; Margaret Cook, the first collector and historian to take community cookbooks seriously, lists ten of them.16 This is an impressive, though not astonishing, number of cookbooks for a city this size. Notably, every one of these eleven was compiled by a church-affiliated group. Though other groups would later compile cookbooks in Oakland, and though a few non-religious groups did the same in other cities in this period, the example of Oakland make clear how theologically oriented the production of cookbooks was.

Notably, proselytizing is not the purpose of these cookbooks. Indeed, the authors often dedicate their religiously based identities to serving quasi- (or non-) religious purposes. The fact that the women who compile and write the cookbooks coalesce around an organized spiritual identity in no way presumes an evangelical or even a non-secular purpose to the funds being raised. Profits from the Guild for Jewish Children’s 1959 cookbook in Newark, New Jersey, for example, went to support Jewish and non-Jewish children’s organizations.17 Profits from the Ann Arbor–based Grace Presbyterian Village Auxiliary’s Village Vittles were pledged to the housing and service needs of the elderly.18 The Eugene Welfare League sold its cookbook to benefit “1. The Well Baby Clinic . . . 2. The Waverly Baby Home . . . 3. Sewing Room Service . . . clothing distributed to the needy . . . 4. Pacific Christian Hospital a ward . . . for the needy invalided children.”19 Churches (and synagogues, and mosques) are, after all, engaged with the community beyond their particular borders, and community cookbooks reflect this.

Occasionally, the devotional nature of the project is almost entirely obscured, often by geographical generality or assumptions that readers would be already familiar with the authorship. The Women’s Auxiliary of St. Andrew’s Church published its 1949 community cookbook, titled Favorite Recipes from Tampa Kitchens, without the organization’s name appearing on the cover or in the text (except once, on page 400).20 No religious sentiment appears in the Ladies’ Aid Society of the Universalist Parish of Bellows Falls cookbook, but the introduction insists that the imperatives of the present “utilitarian age” include a “constant and growing demand for things practical and useful.”21 This would be apparent merely from the title, which promises perhaps too much: The Kitchen Companion and Dining Room Directory: A Convenient and Practical Guide to Cooking

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