The second biennial American culinary history symposium, held a few weeks ago in Ann Arbor, Michigan, left me kind of gasping to process all the things I saw and learned. Where to start? I guess with the symposium itself. It was organized by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, where the former rare-book dealer Jan Longone has begotten an astonishing culinary collection called the “Longone Culinary Archive.” Wow, that library is extraordinary! I just wish I could go back and spend about a year buried there. Jan is an honest-to-God national treasure for her knowledge of American cookbooks—and what’s even more difficult to treat in an intelligent, noncondescending way, American culinary ephemera like manufacturers’ promotional brochures, package-label recipes, all kinds of advertisements. The Longone Archive is a gold mine of all this stuff. The symposium proceedings were too rich and varied to sum up briefly. The theme was American regional and ethnic traditions, about which several people sounded a very welcome “If it sounds too romantic and wonderful to be true, it probably isn’t true’ cautionary note. Will Weaver did himself proud with an extremely thoughtful, nuanced, and also hard-hitting look at the evolution of Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking as (mostly) manufactured concept. Meanwhile, during and in between presentations, the place was bursting with people swapping ideas and pieces of esoteric knowledge. The about-to-retire director of the Clements Library waxed eloquent about a green-fleshed sweet potato that I’d never heard of (“Haman”), once grown on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake and typical of the true local specialties whose disappearance is rapidly erasing the meaning of “regionality.” You could amble around during breaks and hear someone explaining the real history of American pecan pie and American pecan growing to somebody else who knew all about strawberries, etc. One person told me of an Upper Midwest Scandinavian specialty called “coffee cheese,” which I was later able to find in a Wisconsin version at Murray’s Cheese under the Finnish name juustoleipa. Lovely! It’s a fresh-curd cheese pressed into a flat loaf (its name means “cheese bread”), traditionally toasted in front of the fire until the surface gets nicely speckled with brown. People like to put chunks of it in their coffee.
But the crowning moment came after the end of the official proceedings. A few years back, the Longone Archive acquired the only known surviving copy of an invaluable work that seems to be the first cookbook by an African-American, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Recipes by Mrs. Malinda Russell, an Experienced Cook (Paw Paw, Michigan, 1866). It’s a tiny 39-page compilation starting with an autobiographical preface (“My mother being born after the emancipation of my grandmother, her children are by law free.”). The recipes run a gamut from salt-rising bread and “Coffee Cakes” (little raised cakes with cooked rice and cornmeal in the batter or dough) to “Ham Omelet” and ice cream. At one of the early symposium sessions, Jan described the work and its importance, and everyone thought longingly of trying to steal a look at it in the Clements Library. So come Saturday night, as we’re all polishing off the last bite of the official banquet, Jan gets up and says she’s got a little something for us. EVERYONE PRESENT WAS GIVEN A FACSIMILE OF MALINDA RUSSELL’S COOKBOOK! This plan remained a well-kept secret among the library staff and symposium organizers until that very second. What’s even better: When I got home and could examine the book at leisure, I realized that it’s also for sale, for $25, in a limited 1,000-copy edition. Download the order form from the Longone Archive website.
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