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Women’s organizations used charity cookbooks as fundraising resources beginning in the Civil War era. By the turn of the twentieth century, suffragettes increasingly used this format to reinforce their connection to traditional American values while promoting their political cause. The Washington Women’s Cook Book is an example of the variety
While individual physicians and moralists published recipe guides that supported their diet and health theories, women’s groups began authoring cookbooks sold as fundraising efforts in the nineteenth century. These community or charity cookbooks gathered recipes from a region or sponsoring organization to raise funds for local causes. American charity cookbooks
Tuesday’s Special Collections Cooking entry introduced specialized diets that healthcare advocates developed in late nineteenth century America. John Harvey Kellogg promoted low-spice, low-acidity diets that focused on fermentation and yogurts to aid digestion. His advice in his 1893 Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease stressed moderation in diet and modesty
The Special Collections Cooking Series uses recipes and resources from DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives to engage with issues of economics, class, gender, and social changes through American food. In our first week, we cooked Maria Eliza Rundell’s 1823 gooseberry fool recipe and investigated what the increasing mix of cheap
In the first entry in the Special Collections Cooking series, we dove into early American recipe resources in DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives, highlighting the British basis for cookbooks used during the Revolutionary and post-war periods. We saw how eighteenth century recipe books developed from more medicinal European recipe guides
Cookbooks offer a unique opportunity to engage with the historic record through performance, allowing the reader to experiment in the kitchen using the print materials available to the original audience. Reinterpreting historic recipes can be an opportunity to investigate issues of economics, material culture, class, gender, and lifestyles of their