Cookbooks: Community Cookbooks

Recipe collections published to support a charitable cause are known variously as community, charity, regional, and fund-raising cookbooks. The form evolved during the American Civil War in conjunction with sanitary fairs, fund-raisers largely orchestrated by women to raise money for medical corps. Cookbooks to benefit northern and southern veterans, widows, and war orphans followed, and the form was quickly adopted by religious and philanthropic groups. In early community cookbooks (CCBs), recipe donors were usually part of a local or regional community, but a number of later books include recipes contributed by women from across the United States sympathetic to a particular cause. Most nineteenth-century CCBs were created and printed locally, although women’s groups adapted each other’s designs at times. Commercial companies that assisted women in compiling, publishing, distributing, and often, sadly, standardizing their cookbooks came on the scene in the 1930s.