American History through its Recipes: The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive

Janice Longone has been credited with creating the field of American Culinary History.  Janice, along with her husband Dan Longone, have created The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the Clements and the Longone Center for American Culinary Research, “a premier collection for the study of American Culinary History.”  We have interviewed Janice Longone on her life and the many years of work and dedication that were put into the creation of the Archive.

Could you tell us about the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive and the inspiration behind this important undertaking?

I would like to begin by thanking you for the opportunity to share information about the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive (JBLCA) and the Longone Center at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library in Ann Arbor.  I would strongly recommend that those interested in knowing more should browse our website: www.clements.umich.edu (then click on JBLCA)

I have been asked to tell you briefly about myself.  I was born in Boston.  My Mother tells me I was born reading a book!  Probably NOT true – but my whole life has been “bookish.”  My Mother tells me that when I was 5 years old, I asked for my own Library Card.  At that time, to get your own library card in Boston, you had to be able to cross the street by yourself, and since, although I could read, I couldn’t yet cross the street by myself, I was refused.  Evidently, bratty as I was, I created such a scene that I got my Library card and the story appeared in a Boston newspaper!  I do not know if that is a true story, but my Mother told it to me many times – and I have lived my life believing it.

The Sunday between our undergraduate graduations in June, almost 56 years ago, I married the love of my life, whom I had known since childhood, Dan Longone, and we went on to graduate school together at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  Dan worked toward his PhD in Organic Chemistry and I worked fulltime in the Dept. of Rural Sociology and worked toward a degree in Chinese History.   Following a postdoctoral year at the University of Illinois in Champain-Urbana, we came to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, where Dan is now an Emeritus Professor.  The years in Ann Arbor have been good and full ones for us, as have been the various sabbaticals, Fulbrights, lectures, etc. abroad, in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, Great Britain, and other locales.

Engaging fully in the life of the University, the City, the County, the State, and the Country gave us ample opportunity to meet and know people and to learn and expand our horizons.  I am most proud of my years spent in politics, ending with my position as District Representative for a United States Congressman - a responsible and exciting challenge.  When that stage of my life ended, I turned once again to books - and to matters culinary.  I was involved with the opening of Kitchen Port, one of America’s early cooking utensils shops.  Dan and I taught classes on wine and food, travel, gastronomy and culinary history.  And the classes led to the founding of The Wine and Food Library in 1972.  It is now, I believe, the oldest antiquarian culinary bookshop in America.  They tell me I am the oldest antiquarian culinary book dealer in the world!!  Whether that is true, a compliment or an insult, I am not certain.

The bookshop, the books, the clients – was pure joy.  It was a chance to learn and work with history.

One of the great pleasures for me was working with Shirley Smith at WUOM-NPR, where we created what likely was the earliest serious program in America on food history: “Adventures in Gastronomy,” which ran weekly for several years.  You can now hear some of those tapes on the Clements website.

This led to the creation of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor, of which I am the proud Founder and Honorary Chair. It also led to travels in all parts of America, seeking books, visiting the books at the homes of clients of the bookshop, and being asked to lecture and consult all over the world.

Thus in the 1980’s I was asked to speak at Oxford University in England on the subject of American Culinary History, at the one of the first Symposia on Gastronomy. The topics covered such esoteric matters as early 4th century spice trading patterns, and foods of small tribes in mid-Australia or Africa, etc.  This groundbreaking international symposium was attended by all the budding culinary historians in the world.  Many of them had been long-term friends and clients of my bookshop.  So, when they heard I was speaking on AMERICAN culinary history, they laughed, they scoffed – and said “America has NO HISTORY at all, and certainly NO culinary history.  All you eat are hamburgers and fries, WITH KETCHUP!

Well, I had just spent a year of my life researching and writing my lecture, proving otherwise – and I was determined to show them that yes, America HAS a culinary history.

While I was talking and mentioned succotash and ‘rye and injun’ bread, they began nudging each other wondering what I was talking about.  Then when I mentioned a cookbook published in Cleveland in 1842, Philomelia Ann Hardin’s Every Body's Cook and Receipt Book: But More Particularly Designed for Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Wolverines…they wondered what language I was speaking!  When I finished, I was given a standing ovation, and then thanked for introducing a NEW topic of study – American Culinary History.    Native Americans had lived – and eaten here for thousands of years, America had been settled by Europeans for more than 400 years, the United States had existed for 200 years – and they knew less about America than the esoteric subjects mentioned earlier.  I was livid!

I came home determined to learn more about American Culinary History and to share what I learned.  I volunteered at Clements and did many exhibitions for them, including the first serious exhibition ever held on American Culinary History. That exhibition, which Dan and I curated jointly in 1984, changed everything.  James Beard, among others, praised it in his international food column.  Clements had to open more hours per day, more days per week and the Exhibition was held over. Thus was born the field of American Culinary History. And the rest, as they say, is history!

Then in 2000 John Dann, then the Director of the Clements Library, asked me if I would accept a position as Curator of American Culinary History. This was a pioneering appointment, the first ever.  It was both a difficult and an easy decision to make.  Difficult because we had planned a leisurely retirement of travel and study, but easy, because we realized we were the right people in the right place at the right time and we OUGHT to do it.   When I was asked to become curator, my mandate was to create and build a collection, second to none, for the study of American culinary history.  My definition of American Culinary History is everything that influences or influenced America and everything that America influences or influenced in terms of food.  That means, almost everything!

After working at Clements for about a year, we realized that their very small, but select collection, combined with Dan’s and my own personal collections of wine and food books, would create a premier collection for the study of American Culinary History.  So we decided to donate our own collections to the Clements and the UM and thus was created The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the Clements and the Longone Center for American Culinary Research – each still a work in progress.  

More than ten years of our life have been dedicated to making this collection all that it can be.  There are thousands of items – books, advertising ephemera, menus, manuscripts, magazines, journals, graphics, etc. going back to the early 16th century. It is a splendid collection!  And our Archive is immeasurably enhanced by the efforts and labor of dozens of volunteers [we call them docents] who have donated more than 45,000 hours helping us catalog our material and in many other supportive ways.

We have held two very successful Symposia on American Culinary History, with speakers and attendees from all over the United States and the world.  University of Michigan President Mary Sue Colman opened the first symposium, the Dedication of the Archive and Center in 2005, and in 2007, Provost Terry Sullivan welcomed guests to the Second Symposium - Regional and Ethnic Traditions. We have curated more than a dozen culinary exhibitions at the Clements, and elsewhere.

We have welcomed hundreds of visitors and researchers to the Culinary Archive and lectured throughout the United States, spreading the word.

How is the collection organized?  Why was this specific method chosen?

The Clements is a Research Library.  We generally follow Library of Congress cataloging, except that culinary history is such a new field that all of us felt we needed to enhance and/or invent new methods for cataloging.  This has been very time-consuming and difficult, but we feel we have made our resources more readily available.  Please see the Clements website and the University of Michigan Mirlyn catalog for more information.  We are still a work in progress and are working on updating our website.

What are some of the earliest works in the collection?  What do they tell us about the beginnings of American cuisine?

Our collection begins within 16th century  European works seminal to any study of American culinary history.   The first cookbook published in America in 1742 was an English reprint; it was not until 1796 that Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, generally considered to be the first written by an American for Americans. From that time on, until the end of the 19th century, we have almost all of the major culinary works printed in America.  [We do have a short “wish list” for those few missing items!] From 1900 to 1950, we have a more select representation in every aspect of American culinary history.  Our holdings after 1950 are mostly reference works.  There is some consideration of expanding the collection to 2000.

How has media coverage of the culinary arts evolved over the years?

We have been overwhelmed by the amount of publicity our work and the Archive and Center have generated.  Major national newspapers, local newspapers, foreign newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the blogosphere have all covered our work.  We are most grateful for this.  The Archive keeps a notebook of all of this publicity.

Which titles in the collection stand out most?

Here I should repeat that we are NOT YET fully cataloged, so some of these items may not appear in Mirlyn.  We add titles weekly.
Although I am not normally addicted to first editions, I am proud of the many firsts we have:
Amelia Simmons, American Cookery   1796   (First American cookbook)
Robert Roberts, The House Servants Directory   1827  (First Household management Cookbook authored by an African American)
Mrs. N.K.M. Lee, The Cook’s Own Book   1827  (First alphabetically arranged culinary encyclopedia published in America) 
Eliza Leslie, Seventy-five Receipts   1827  (plus almost all of her many other culinary works)
M.J.M. (Maria J. Moss), A Poetical Cook-Book   1864  (First charitable cookbook in America)
Malinda Russell,  A Domestic Cookbook   1866  (First African-American-authored Cookbook in America)
Mrs. Esther Levy,  A Cookery Book    1871 (First Jewish cookbook in America)
The National Cook Book  1876  (Published for the Centennial of America’s birth; the first “national”cookbook)
The Creole Cookbook  1885 (First New Orleans charity cookbook; plus the first charity cookbook published in many States

Also, firsts of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catherine Beecher, Fannie Farmer, Mary Lincoln, Maria Parloa, Mrs. Rorer (100+ items), Juliet Corson, Marion Harland. Janet McKenzie Hill, Alice Bradley, Ida Bailey Allen, Irma Rombauer, Mrs. Kander, MFK Fisher, Julia Child and more.

Also, excellent collections of 
*Regional and Ethnic culinary Americana
*Charity Cookbooks prior to 1920
*Foreign-language American imprint cookbooks prior to 1950
*Culinary and women’s magazine
 *10,000 items of culinary advertising ephemera (Jell-O to stoves)
*Menu collection (just beginning cataloging)
*Houseware,  cooking and baking utensils and equipment catalogs (both home  and professional kitchens)
*Military and wartime cooking (both the homefront and in the fields and hospitals)
*Wine and other beverages
*Baking and Confectionery
*Hotels, chefs and restaurants
*Women’s empowerment through cookbooks
*Service and Servants
*Etiquette and manners
*Children’s cookery
*ETC., ETC., ETC.  [I feel I am slighting the collection; it is huge and diverse]

Here is an example of one item we are especially proud of:  the discovery and sharing of the first African-American authored cookbook – Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book, 1866.  For many years, the world thought that What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, published in San Francisco in 1881, was the first black-authored cookbook in America (which Clements also has).  Many culinary historians thought there MUST be some earlier ones.  When Dan and I found Malinda’s book, published 15 years earlier, we discovered we had the only known copy in the world of the true first black-authored cookbook in America!  We spent many years, including our 48th wedding anniversary trying to track Malinda down in all the locales she mentions in her book.  Although we felt we came close, we are not yet certain we have done so.  We donated the book to the Clements.  For the Second Biennial Symposium on American Culinary History, we printed a limited edition facsimile of Malinda, with a new introduction and index.  It was given as a memento to attendees at the Symposium, and we still have a few copies left to sell. 

Malinda, as we call her, was born a free woman of color in Tennessee.  At age 19, she was on her way to Liberia in the Back to Africa movement when she was robbed of all her possessions.  So, she stopped in Lynchburg, Virginia and began to take in laundry and do other work.  She married, had a child born, as she tells us “crippled”, and her husband died after four years.  She then pulled herself up by her bootstraps and went on to become a well respected cook, and kept a boarding on Chuckey Mountain and a pastry shop in Tennessee.  During the Civil War, she was so outspoken pro-Union that she was once again robbed of her property by a “guerilla party” and was “obliged to leave home.”  She had heard that Michigan was the garden of the West and so she came to Michigan, near Paw Paw.  When the War ended she wrote her cookbook and had it published in Paw Paw in 1866.  And continuing her indomitable spirit, she wrote this book so she could return to Tennessee and reclaim her property, for her son’s sake.  This woman was remarkable. She is a role model. Her story is a true American story. 

With your expertise on the evolution of the American kitchen, what do you see as the future of American cuisine?

This is a difficult question to answer.  The world moves very quickly these days.

I think we will continue to have contributions to American cuisine by many new ethnic and immigrant groups. I think there will always be a battle between those interested in “eating to live” and those “living to eat.”   There will be many new inventions and methods of cooking (robots?).  Pressures of time, economic, ecological, climatic, political upheavals – all will affect the future of American cuisine.  Yet, there is hope that the old traditions will not be lost.  There are many young people who are interested in knowing the past and preserving what was best in it.

Thank you.
Jan Longone
Curator of American Culinary History
Clements Library
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109            February 28, 2010