Cookbooks from SMU’s 200-year history are featuring in Degolyer Library Exhibits

SMU,Texas:

DeGolyer Library will have an exhibit through Dec. 22 titled “The Joy of Cooking – Two Centuries of Cookbooks,” featuring 206 cookbooks from the library’s 6,000-cookbook collection acquired over the decades as part of the Western Americana, Transportation Collection. , women’s history and business history items.

SMU’s DeGolyer Library has opened a new cookbook exhibit that looks at history through a culinary lens just in time for the holidays. A collection of ethnic cookbooks is available, as is a book of handwritten recipes from 1816.

The oldest cookbook on display is an 1816 leather-bound recipe book by Doña María Josefa de la Luz Tapia. The cookbook includes recipes such as pivipolo, a Day of the Dead dish featuring seasoned chicken wrapped in cornmeal.

Stanley Marcus’ holiday drink book, The Holiday Drink Book, “When you drink, beware the toast, for that’s when the danger is greatest.”

The exhibit’s curator, Christina Jensen, head of public services at the library, said cookbooks are more than recipes. An Economic, Technological, Family and Social Timeline.”

Jensen says that at least half of many cookbooks contain dessert recipes.

Despite war rations, Americans craved sweets, according to Jensen, whose eggless, the butterless, creamless cake recipe is in the Liberty Cookbook. Several other cookbooks are part of the exhibit, including historic and Dallas Jewish cookbooks, as well as classic Southern cookbooks such as International Cuisine and Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis.

Food and drink aren’t the only things on display. In her handwritten notebooks, Lucretia Eleanor Thomas provides household recipes for marble paste and furniture polish. Despite all the practical recipes she includes in this book, it appears that the soft gingerbread recipe is the most stained, with stains on dried peaches, calf’s foot jelly and poor man’s cake.

While stuck at home during Covid, Curator Jensen started looking for good recipes to cook. Her search for recipes, and the idea for the exhibit, was inspired by the shelves of cookbooks in DeGolia’s library she passed each day on her way to the elevator.

He says cookbooks can help you revisit 200 years of history.

Spanish and German recipes as well as Lucille B. Treasures such as Smith’s Treasures of Fine Foods are on display, including a box of recipe cards created by the cookbook author, who founded one of the first commercial food technology programs at Prairie View A&M College and invented the first commercial hot roll mix.

News Source : Degolyer