History in the everyday, the importance of community cookbooks - Gillian Polack

I collect cookbooks produced by communities. Sometimes they’re big volumes, stuffed with recipes from every single family that attends a primary school, sometimes the recipes are full of healthy ingredients to reflect the interests of a life-saving organisation. One book is full of recipes from tins and packets. A whole group of books are simply copied from a stock source, with the names of the organisations changed. 

Last year a hundred of my community cookbooks were stolen and this week a friend posted a few replacements as a gift.

This is why I’m writing about them today. The changes in my collection and the emotions behind them – the sorrow of losing so much and the joy of friends remembering me and sending me more – brings the history of cookbooks into the forefront of my mind.

This post is dedicated to those kind friends who are watching out for community cookbooks for me because of last year’s loss. I want to talk about why it matters to me so very much. As well as what I talk about here, I use my collection to build foodways for characters in my fiction, but that’s a different story. It’s just as important: fiction rings out to the reader more clearly when the food is the right food for the place and time and when a character has their own interpretation of it. If the interpretation is sound then a simple cooking scene will resonate with every single reader who has a share in such a foodway. A different story, but a fascinating one.

This type of volume is a by-product of printing. It never has been a major part of the industry, but it’s been around for a while.

The reason for a community to order a cookbook are varied. Some are to raise funds and some are to commemorate a big event and some are ‘because we felt like it.’ My own recipes are in several of the volumes that survived the theft. One of the volumes (Homemade, 2009) raised money for bushfire victims, and another (Scary Food) is part of a horror anthology edited by Cat Sparks. The first is all recipes, dense and rich. Half the copies printed were given to those who lost everything in the 2009 bushfires, which means some of us who contributed gave important family recipes, in the hopes that we might replicate recipes that had been lost in the fire. Scary Food is mostly short stories, with just a sprinkling of dark recipes.

This kind of book, like the seventeenth century chapbook, a form of cultural ephemera. While a few volumes may be treasured for years or may enter collections, most fade. Some of the volumes are foodie treasures and some of them echo the worst food of a time and place, or the idea (when the book is pre-packaged and just the name of the organisation is changed) that there is a shared cuisine in a given place at a given time.

These books are fragments of our foodways. 

If I were making a time capsule, I would include a community cookbook. It would tell the person who opened the time capsule so much about the people who buried it. What recipes were worth including in the book? What group of people does the volume’s creation tell us about and what background do they share? 

What does it tell us about the foodways of the group that published it? If the book is laid out according to courses, as many are, it tells us a lot about the way food was served. How much fat/spice/sugar do recipes have? It tells about eating habits and dietary preferences. There’s a lot of information scrunched between the covers of a community cookbook.

Sometimes I pull out volumes from a single geographical region and arrange them in time order and discover what has happened over time to a given place. Sometimes I pull out the volumes published in a five year period and arrange them geographically. Sometimes I pull out the volumes shared by sports teams and sometimes primary schools. Each time I do this, I learn more about the culture and history that underpin our food. I also learn about people.

Edited and professional cookbooks have a different focus. They share just as much wonderful information, but they share it differently. Even the ones that are published to represent a group or who are from a food writer who is lovingly detailing the family’s past read differently to most community cookbooks. Professionalism changes the context of a cookbook and that book tells us a different story because of it.

Sometimes I think that the community books are like seventeenth century chapbooks. I still love seventeenth century chapbooks and my volumes of reprints are fewer, too, because of that theft, but this isn’t the parallel I’m making today. Nor is the obvious one: that both are printed ephemera. The audience is the interesting bit for me. Chapbooks have a different audience to bigger volumes because they wee cheap and more disposable. They also have a different audience because they were often brought into lives by peddlers and on streets rather than being the stuff of up-market bookshops. The peddler and the community stall at a fete have overlapping social roles.

The other book that has something important in common with the community cookbooks is the handwritten record of family histories. They linked to the other end of the market, during their earlier days, because literacy was not even close to universal when individuals started writing down their family recipes. Household notes, or detailed recipes - some families kept them. They cover some of the same functions as the community cookbook, preserving local foodways.

Although there is overlap in the writing down of foodways, these handwritten collections often don’t reflect quite the same aspects of culture as appear in a community cookbook. An individual writing recipes (Martha Lloyd, for instance, in Jane Austen’s family) makes personal choices about what part of the family’s food experience need preserving. It’s not the same as a “We have two weeks to collet your favourite recipes. Ready, set, go!” 

What they share is that need to define what’s valuable to the family, to the community. Many of the recipes In the bushfire cookbook are nothing like those in some of the community cookbooks lost in the fires. Most of those parts of rural Victoria had very Anglo cuisines in its community books for many years. Recipes for dishes such as scones were consistent across space and even time in that region. Homemade, the bushfire book, has three scone recipes, and none of them are for plain scones. One is for ham and cheese (in pinwheels) and the others are lemonade scones and pumpkin scones. Scones are still a recipe that helps heal, but the type of scone has changed just as the culture of the community has changed over time.

That’s why I love these cookbooks so very much. I can read the foodways over time and those foodways are magic.

Cooking Up History... - Celia Rees

Cookery Books

Like many writers, I have lots of books: fiction, non fiction, biographies, books bought for research which could cover almost anything, travel books, history books, books about writing,  myths and legends. The list is endless. I have many book cases and book shelves but they are all stuffed full, so the books spill into piles: current reading, current writing projects, books I vaguely mean to read about things I vaguely mean to do. I need to get rid of some but like other writers, I find that difficult. I might need them. I know if I get rid of something, I will almost certainly have an idea which means I need to look at that very book.  Not only that, there's a deeper problem. I've had some of these books for a long time, since childhood, school, university. My own history is on those shelves.

No-where is this more apparent than on the cookery book shelves. I have a storage problem here, too. The bookcase in the kitchen which holds my collection is  jammed with spillover stacked around. Time for a cull, but once I begin to look at what's there, I feel reluctant to lose any of them. As Neil Young says: all my changes are there. Cookery books take you back to a particular time and place. Not only your own personal circumstances, but the society around you. I grew up in the fifties and sixties in a lower middle class household at a time when for most people (people like us) olive oil was sold in the chemist as a cure for ear ache, coffee came out of a bottle and spaghetti came out of a tin.
My mother was a very good cook, as her mother had been before her, but the food we ate was a plain, British cuisine. British food has been much maligned, perhaps because it is so familiar to us, or maybe because restaurant and hotel food used to do it so badly, but when it is done well, it is very good indeed. My mother could see no reason to go outside her extensive repertoire of traditional dishes. If she used a recipe book at all, it was Marguerite Patten.

As a child, I was happy enough to go along with this, I knew nothing else, but as an older teenager, I began to be aware that there were different kinds of food out there, the kind of things that people ate in books and in films. My first introduction to foreign food, as it was suspiciously termed, was Chinese. My brother took me to a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham for a Businessman's Lunch. After some initial caution, it looked so different, I tried a forkful of Chow Mein and I loved it! Deep Fried Banana - even better.  Not long after this, a boyfriend took me to an Italian restaurant in Soho. I burnt my mouth on the Cannelloni that I had chosen because I wasn't sure how to eat 'proper' spaghetti but I was determined to learn.

My first foray into 'foreign' cooking was when my brother introduced me to Vesta and a whole battery of exotic meals: Chow Mein, Risotto, Paella and Curry. I thought they were achingly sophisticated and they didn't tax my minimal (at this time) culinary skills.

My mother did not approve. She didn't object to the foreignness but she did object to almost everything else. The highly processed nature of it, all the goodness freeze dried out of it.  If my brother and I wanted to eat food like this, we would learn how to cook it together from fresh ingredients. She bought an international cookery book called something like Foods From Around the World, which to my lasting regret I no longer have, and we never looked back.

When I went away to university, this little book went with me - a gift from my mother. Wise woman, she knew the ways to a man's heart. I've had the book ever since, stained and dog-eared the pages browned and foxed. I still cook from it sometimes - there is an excellent recipe for Sweet and Sour Pork - and Goulash.

After university, I moved to Manchester and remember buying Susan Campbell and Caroline Conran's  Poor Cook in the bookshop in St Anne's Square. I forget the name of the shop but it is a Waterstones now. Manchester introduced me to different cuisines:  Italian, Greek, Mexican, Peking Chinese as well as different styles of Indian cooking. I had my first taste of Lasagna, Hummus, Moussaka, Peking Duck, Chilli Con Carne, Rogan Josh. I got the hang of eating spaghetti and mastered chopsticks. Susan Campbell and Caroline Conran not only taught me how to prepare different kinds of recipes but also told me about food, cookery and cookery writers. The ingredients were readily available: ethnic shops for vegetables and spices, hippy health food places for the beans, chick peas and lentils needed for vegetarian recipes (like those in The Cranks Recipe Book - what goes around comes around). Not every effort was a success, I remember my first attempt at Hummus had the look and consistency of quick setting cement, but I was hooked on trying different things and hooked on cookery books. I bought books on Greek Cookery, Indian Cookery, French, Italian. I discovered the great cookery writers, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson and read their books avidly. I found that a good cookery book is not just about recipes, it is about the places the recipes come from, the people who live there, what they eat and how they live. Cookery books like this make you want to travel, experience those places for yourself.

Nothing evokes the past more than a particular dish, a particular recipe and, for me, nothing conjures a time more than the book in which that recipe is to be found. From Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson through Graham Kerr, Keith Floyd and the Two Fat Ladies,  River Cafe, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, to Ottolenghi and Hemsley and Hemsley, these cookery books don't just catalogue a personal culinary history, they take us from the middle of the twentieth century into the new millennia. They chart changes in what we eat, and how we live. The market follows taste and demand. What was once a rarity is now readily available in any supermarket. One day, Ottolenghi and zahtah will mark a point in our history as clearly as Marguerite Patten and Camp coffee. That's why I can't get rid of my old cookery books. No matter how old they are, or what kind of state they are in, they speak of time and place and what the world was like then.



Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com