Cookbooks: Community Cookbooks: Early Developments

Protestant church women were the most frequent publishers of early CCBs, although synagogue sisterhoods and women in other denominations soon followed suit. By the early 1900s, CCBs were being published all over the country, and the form had been adapted by business and professional women’s groups, chapters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, homes for orphans and widows, schools, women supporters of veterans’ groups, suffrage proponents, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), granges, expositions and fairs. The well-known Creole Cookery was put out in 1885 by the Christian Women’s Exchange of New Orleans. Jewish women in San Francisco published the Council Cook Book in 1909, with recipes for Passover as well as for tamales, ravioli, mulligatawny, and many seafood dishes. These older recipe collections usually contain prefatory matter attesting to the “tried-and-true” nature of the dishes included but frequently also contain caveats concerning a book’s modest goals or its authors’ lack of professional culinary training.