New cookbook delves into Cairns Collection
By Katie Gilbert
Library Communications
For most nineteenth-century women, domestic life centered on the kitchen
and the meals prepared there. A group of members from the Friends of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries are recreating a sense of that
life through those meals with a cookbook, using literary excerpts describing
meals or meal preparation along with recipes from contemporary cookbooks.
The cookbook, A Literary Feast: Recipes and Writings by American Women
Authors from History, appears in book stores Aug. 1 and is the culmination
of 10 years of work.
A Literary Feast recalls the days before microwaves, refrigerators and
standardized cooking measurements. The recipes were selected from the
William
B. Cairns Collection of American Women Writers (1650-1920) in Special
Collections, which is primarily a literary collection of approximately
8,000 titles by more than 3,250 women writers. The cookbook highlights
fiction and nonfiction pieces by female authors such as Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening, Louisa May5 Alcott’s Little Women and Catharine Beecher
and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home, or,
Principles of Domestic Science, as well as cookbooks from the Cairns Collection.
Other recipes come from the historical cookbook collection at Steenbock
Library, the Wisconsin Historical Society, second-hand bookstores and
family collections. The writers appearing in this collection, including
Louisa May Alcott and Kate Douglas Wiggin, often celebrated with special
meals in their novels and the recipes in the cookbook reflect food women
would have prepared at the time. The cookbook includes instructions for
chowders, pies, candy, vegetables and more.
Although most recipes were not kitchen-tested, they were adapted to meet modern cooking practices and the authors enjoyed the recipes they made.
“I spent a whole weekend measuring cups of sugar and flour,” said Yvonne Schofer, the English Humanities bibliographer at Memorial Library and editor of the cookbook. “I had to make sure the recipes could be understood and if you did try to prepare something, it would turn out normally.”
A Literary Feast was compiled by Joan Jones, Loni Hayman and Anne C. Tedeschi, all Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Jones Books publishes the cookbook.
