{"id":554,"date":"2011-04-11T06:25:21","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T11:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gastronomyatbu.wordpress.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2018-03-28T17:55:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T21:55:00","slug":"graduating-project-barbara-rotger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/2011\/04\/11\/graduating-project-barbara-rotger\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduating Project | Barbara Rotger’s How to Read a Recipe Box: A Scholar\u2019s Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Edna Abenss recipe box<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Barbara Rotger<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Both my grandmothers\u2019 recipe boxes sit on top of the bookshelf in my office, and the first paper I wrote as a student in the Gastronomy program was an analysis of these, plus I few others I have acquired as a result of an eBay habit. More accurately, this first paper was an attempt<\/em> at such an analysis. Looking back at it, I see that it was not my best work. The truth is, recipe boxes and their kin \u2014 manuscript recipe books and recipe scrapbooks \u2014 are not easy sources to work with, if you can find them at all. They usually lack any kind of organizational structure, including indexes and page numbers, and often feature crumbling newspaper clippings or illegible handwriting.<\/p>\n

You might ask, \u201cWhy not just use cookbooks?\u201d After all, a number of scholars have done very interesting work in this area, especially with community cookbooks.\u00a0 There are some very good reasons to look at recipe collections instead. To me, this difference can be summed up as follows: cookbooks say, \u201cThis is who we would like you to think we are\u201d while recipes collections say, \u201cThis is who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working my way through the program, I periodically returned to the idea of using personal recipe collections as sources and developed my own informal methods for approaching them. As a student in Professor Glick\u2019s cookbook seminar I realized that there was a need for a more structured approach. My thesis project represents an attempt to do just this: develop a comprehensive methodology for analyzing personal recipe collections as historical, cultural and gendered artifacts.<\/p>\n

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Sample documents from Irene Millss recipe box<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The idea of considering personal recipe collections as artifacts rather than as texts is critical to my approach, and leads me to borrow from the techniques of material culture. It can be reduced to a three-step process: description, induction and speculation. \u00a0A critical point is that this is inductive research<\/em>. I do not start by proposing a hypothesis and setting out to prove or disprove it. Rather, inductive research starts out by looking at the body of data available and asking (inducing) what it means.<\/p>\n

In my thesis, I walk the reader through two examples to demonstrate this technique. First, I examine a recipe scrapbook that Isabella Ward of Brooklyn, New York, began in 1915, and look at the impact that World War I food policies had on her cooking.\u00a0 My second example is a comparison of two recipe boxes from central Iowa, one belonging to Edna Abens, begun in the 1930s, and the second from Irene Mills, who started collecting about forty years later. I considered how these women\u2019s roles, particularly as food providers, changed over time and surprised myself with the conclusions I drew. Let\u2019s just say I have come to think of Jell-O salads and cream-of-mushroom-soup casseroles in a whole new light.<\/p>\n

The interesting thing about inductive research is that another scholar might use the same set of data (the recipe collections) and come up with an entirely different analysis. \u00a0For example, the Isabella Ward\u2019s book contains a number of recipes for wine, and I could have considered this fact in light of its prohibition-era provenance. Similarly, I might have looked at the two recipe boxes and pursued questions regarding religious beliefs, ethnic identity or social class. The possibilities for exploring personal recipe collections are immense. I have become an evangelist for this cause, and hope to inspire other to go \u201cread\u201d a recipe box.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Barbara Rotger Both my grandmothers\u2019 recipe boxes sit on top of the bookshelf in my office, and the first paper I wrote as a student in the Gastronomy program was an analysis of these, plus I few others I have acquired as a result of an eBay habit. More accurately, this first paper was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8559,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/8559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}