When I talk about community cookbooks, I’m referring to cookbooks that were compiled and often sold as fundraisers for churches, schools, political organizations, social groups, and other community and regional organizations from the 1800s on. The contributors to these books were ordinary people, largely women, who were sharing recipes special to them with the wider community. Often spiral bound and without photographs, these books provide a peek not into what people were eating at the time of publication but what was important to their community.
I’m based in Baltimore, Maryland and as such primarily collect books from Maryland and the general Mid-Atlantic region: Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. but I don’t discriminate! I’ll take any cookbook that looks good.
Other features of these cookbooks:
- The books feature recipes from a group or organization
- The contributors are largely home cooks, not professional recipe developers or chefs
- The books generally had a set print amount and are no longer being published
- They were not published by large, commercial publishing houses but by local printers, in-house or by community cookbook publishing companies.
One reason why I love community cookbooks is because we know these are recipes that people actually made and loved enough to share. Often when looking through old cookbooks it’s hard to tell if it is a popular recipe or something the author (or company, there are a lot company company-written cookbooks out there with some wild recipes) came up with themselves. Did anyone ever actually make the recipes in these books? Were they actually popular? It really difficult to determine that decades out. I’ve written several cookbooks and outside of myself, I have no idea if anyone has ever made a single recipe out of any of them. With community cookbooks that question is answered. These are recipes people made in their own homes, in that era and decided to share for no reason other than to contribute to the cookbook.