10,000 Vintage Recipe Books Are Now Digitized in The Internet Archive’s Cookbook & Home Economics Collection

“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grand señores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient Rome, cookbooks functioned similarly, as the extravagant fourth century Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome demonstrates.

Written by Apicus, “Europe’s oldest [cookbook] and Rome’s only one in existence today”—as its first English translator described it—offers “a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life.” It also offers keen insight into the development of heavily flavored dishes before the age of refrigeration. Apicus recommends that “cooks who needed to prepare birds with a ‘goatish smell’ should bathe them in a mixture of pepper, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, honey, vinegar, broth, oil and mustard,” Melanie Radzicki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.


Early cookbooks communicated in “a folksy, imprecise manner until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s,” when standard (or metric) measurement became de rigueur. The first cookbook by an American, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, placed British fine dining and lavish “Queen’s Cake” next to “johnny cake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack,” Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald writes at Smithsonian, all recipes symbolizing “the plain, but well-run and bountiful American home.” With this book, “a dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.”

Cookbooks are windows into history—markers of class and caste, documents of daily life, and snapshots of regional and cultural identity at particular moments in time. In 1950, the first cookbook written by a fictional lifestyle celebrity, Betty Crocker, debuted. It became “a national best-seller,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the perfect Stepford housewife may have been bigger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crocker’s career was decades in the making. She debuted in 1921, the year of publication for another, more humble recipe book: the Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society of Chicago’s Pilgrim Cook Book.

As Ayun Halliday noted in an earlier post, this charming collection features recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy,” and it’s only one of thousands of such examples at the Internet Archive’s Cookbook and Home Economics Collection, drawn from digitized special collections at UCLA, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the collection featured 3,000 cookbooks. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 10,600 vintage examples of homespun Americana, fine dining, and mass marketing.

Laugh at gag-inducing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice given to women ostensibly anxious to please their husbands; and marvel at how various international and regional cuisines have been represented to unsuspecting American home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cover or the contents of a Chinese Cook Book in Plain English from 1917 seem more offensive.) Cookbooks of recipes from the American South are popular, as are covers featuring stereotypical “mammy” characters. A more respectful international example, 1952’s Luchow’s German Cookbook gives us “the story and the favorite dishes of America’s most famous German restaurant.”

There are guides to mushrooms and “commoner fungi, with special emphasis on the edible varieties”; collections of “things mother used to make” and, most practically, a cookbook for leftovers. And there is every other sort of cookbook and home ec. manual you could imagine. The archive is stuffed with helpful hints, rare ingredients, unexpected regional cookeries, and millions of minute details about the habits of their first hungry readers.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Vietnamese activist and journalist Pham Doan Trang arrested for ‘anti-state propaganda’

‘Send me my guitar and try to have the wardens accept it’

A 2018 video interview with Pham Doan Trang. Source: Screenshot of YouTube video by Člověk v tísni

Prominent Vietnamese activist and journalist Pham Doan Trang was arrested by the police on October 6 for charges related to “conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 88 of the 1999 Penal Code, and “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117 of the 2015 Penal Code. She faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted.

Doan Trang is part of the editorial board of The Vietnamese Magazine. She founded the online legal magazine Luat Khoa. She was also one of the founders of the Liberal Publishing House whose books on democracy have been confiscated by authorities. She also co-founded the Vietnam Legal Initiative, a United States-based NGO working to promote human rights in Vietnam.

Doan Trang authored the following books: Politics for the Common People, A Handbook for Families of Prisoners, On Non-Violent Resistance Techniques, Politics of a Police State and Citizen Journalism.

Doan Trang was previously arrested by the police for her role in protests against China’s incursion into Vietnam’s maritime territories and a community action protesting environment pollution. In several interviews, she narrated the attacks and harassment she endured in the hands of the police.

Pham Doan Trang, the night she was arrested. (October 6, 2020) pic.twitter.com/4sCqNnH6fi

— Will Nguyen (阮英惟) (@will_nguyen_) October 9, 2020

It is not clearly stated what prompted her arrest. It could be related to articles she wrote about the government crackdown on land rights defenders or her work with the Liberal Publishing House. Another reason could be linked to security preparations for the plenum of the Communist Party this month since previous meetings were accompanied by similar arrests targeting dissidents and independent writers.

“Just In Case I Am Imprisoned”

Doan Trang, who faced constant threats and surveillance from the police, anticipated her arrest as early as May 2019. She instructed her friend to release a letter titled “Just In Case I Am Imprisoned” if ever she was arrested.

Pham Doan Trang left this letter with me, to publicize upon her arrest. Please share. pic.twitter.com/lVt52Kpkea

— Will Nguyen (阮英惟) (@will_nguyen_) October 7, 2020

In her letter, she asked those who will campaign for her freedom to prioritize other prisoners of conscience. She also wrote about the need to campaign for democratic reforms in Vietnam:

I don’t need freedom just for myself, that would be too easy. I want something much greater: freedom and democracy for all of Vietnam. It might see like some grand goal, but it’s totally possible, with your support.

She added that she will not “admit guilt, confess, or beg for leniency” because she is innocent. She has a personal appeal:

Send me my guitar and try to have the wardens accept it – For me, the guitar is like my Bible.

Several human rights advocates and media groups have issued statements in support of Doan Trang. Tran Quynh Vi, editor-in-chief of The Vietnamese Magazine, wrote about the importance of Doan Trang’s work as a journalist and activist:

Pham Doan Trang is a highly-respected journalist who has diligently expanded the political and legal information for the masses in Vietnam, encouraging people to practice the universal values of freedom and democracy that are stated clearly in Vietnam’s Constitution and which the government has also supported in many of the international treaties it has signed.

Hugo Setzer, president of the International Publishers Association, praised Doan Trang’s efforts to publish books on democratic reforms:

Pham Doan Trang took these risks knowingly in defence of freedom of expression. I salute her bravery and her strength of conviction. We hear her call for election reform in Vietnam, but we must also denounce her arrest and urge the Vietnamese authorities to release her.

As of this writing, Doan Trang’s family was already able to send some items for her personal needs but they have yet to see and talk to her in person.

Written by Mong Palatino

Analysis: The US and Europe face rising Covid-19 case numbers as they squander lessons from Asia-Pacific – CNN

While the Asia-Pacific region treads water until a coronavirus vaccine is found, the West’s biggest economies are drowning as a second wave firmly establishes itself in Europe. Europe is now reporting more daily infections than the United States, Brazil, or India — the countries that have been driving the global case count for months — as public apathy grows towards coronavirus guidelines. Several countries are seeing infection rates spiral again after a summer lull that saw measures to contain the virus and travel restrictions relaxed. In the United Kingdom, for example, questions are being asked about whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to lift the country’s lockdown in June was premature. Northern England’s current high rates of Covid-19 are down to the fact that infections “never dropped as far in the summer as they did in the south,” Jonathan Van-Tam, Britain’s deputy chief medical officer, told a press conference on Monday.

Source: Analysis: The US and Europe face rising Covid-19 case numbers as they squander lessons from Asia-Pacific – CNN

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