Public and Professional Dimensions of Creative Food History Programs

Food history offers opportunities to engage broad publics in the study of the past and it also offers historians opportunities to expand their career options.  In this presentation, I will reflect on both those issues based on my experience teaching historic cooking classes, talking with students, and writing for public audiences.  First, I will explain my food history activities, which draw on my training as a historian and my background as a former pastry chef.  Next, I will reflect on the value and challenges of these programs.  As I will discuss, my students and readers have asked sophisticated questions about the production, distribution, and consumption of food.  They have been inspired to share stories about their own family food histories.  And they have grappled with the possibility of remaining faithful to original recipes versus the necessity of interpreting recipes to make them palatable today.  Yet, I have found, food’s very accessibility can mislead people about the foreignness of the past, and the nature of these programs makes it hard to assess what people have learned.  Finally, I will end by sharing what I have found to be the professional value of culinary history to my career in an “alt-ac” job.  As we explore these issues, I will share samples of a cookie – jumbles – from the first African American cookbook, published by Malinda Russell in 1866, along with her recipe.