Future Knowledge

[00:00:00] Vida: Welcome to the Future Knowledge Podcast and our special summer series on vanishing culture, brought to you by me, Vida, and the Internet Archive. We're talking with the archivists, librarians, and creators fighting to preserve our shared cultural history

[00:00:24] Dave & Chris: Hey listeners, I'm Dave Hansen and I'm Chris Freeland. This is Future Knowledge. A note as we start up. We're sharing a special six-part weekly series called Vanishing Culture, exploring what's at risk of being lost in the digital age and why preservation matters. series is inspired by Vanishing Culture, the new book from the Internet Archive.

[00:00:45] You can read it online for free at archive.org or find it in print at your favorite bookstore. And now on with today's episode.

[00:00:56] Vida: Today, we're talking about the preservation of ephemeral domestic culture, like recipes and knitting patterns. How are realms of knowledge traditionally associated with women's work particularly vulnerable to vanishing? And how is the internet contributing to vanishing food culture?

[00:01:17] We're talking to Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University, who specializes in domestic culture and 19th century women's literature. Katie told me about her interest in preserving recipes, which was sparked by a family cookbook of her grandmother's passed down through generations

[00:01:40] Katie Livingston: So the cookbook is called Down Home Cooking, And it's the, like a Grady County Homemaker's Extension Council cookbook. So it's this very, very, I guess, like discreet regional cookbook, and these are very common over the US, particularly in rural areas, where they'll just kind of like aggregate recipes from women, either in the county or within a specific women's group.

[00:02:05] They're also super common among churches and even things like the electric cooperatives where I'm from will release cookbooks as well. So my specific memory of this cookbook is my grandma, she has, you know, quite a collection of sort of like small cookbooks like this, or they would be considered regional, church cookbooks or whatever.

[00:02:26] In addition to some of the more common ones, like the Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks. But this cookbook in particular, I remember was just kind of a touchstone cookbook for us. I believe it has her favorite recipe for pancakes, and it's very worn and very well-loved. The cover has completely fallen off, so you can kind of see fact of it's being handled over and over again.

[00:02:49] But I particularly remember her getting it out for pancakes of all things, and then when I was reading through it, I found some more like heavily marked recipes. So that kind of my... was my interaction with it when I was a kid. It's mainly pancakes

[00:03:06] Vida: This type of cultural artifact must present a lot of preservation challenges. It's fragile and full of handwritten marginalia. I asked Katie why she thinks it's important to preserve domestic culture through personal artifacts like cookbooks.

[00:03:25] Katie Livingston: That's a really big question because food culture and recipe culture and cookbook culture are all very broad and slightly different things. You know, I think cookbooks As a genre, or at least the way that we interact with them, are kind of a relatively contemporary thing. And the way that recipes, historically have been preserved mostly has been within familial or cultural knowledge, just kind of, like, being passed down.

[00:03:55] So I think that there's something particularly interesting in the fact that cookbooks, they kind of put, like, a boundary around a culture, right? in the case of the one that I looked at for the article I wrote, that's a county. So that's kind of like, okay, we're, like, setting a boundary here, and we're going to talk about what is our food culture within the boundaries of this, specific county.

[00:04:18] Or if it's in a church, it's gonna articulate, okay, what's, the food culture within the church? And so it kind of puts these sometimes, you know, artificial in a way, boundaries around a specific food culture and then articulates it. So I think that's very interesting. And then at the level of, I guess, a national cookbook

[00:04:40] I think Better Homes and Gardens is, really interesting cookbook because for a long time it's been kind of the standard in American cookbooks, and it was used in home economics class for, like, you know, women across the US. So that's probably as close as you can get to sort of, like, standardizing US food culture.

[00:05:01] So I think, aside from sort of being able to use them as a way to understand, maybe discrete art communities or the way those communities are articulating themselves is, I think that there's something that's very, historically illuminating about Looking at, you know, the cookbooks from, say, my region in Oklahoma from, the early '20s down to current day, right?

[00:05:26] Because what you'll get then is, a sort of shifting culture around food. And just using my interest in, aspic as an example. When they were sort of first introduced into, like, the American consciousness and cookbooks about aspics were being released, there was this kind of idea of them as, like, very high culture.

[00:05:44] There was a lot of reference to, like, the French and these kind of elaborate French pastries. And then they slowly became more, like, with the introduction of Jell-O, right? They became more accessible. And then there was kind of like a peak of aspics in the mid-century, where it was a part of, like, normal everyday food culture.

[00:06:04] And then, a falling off where they became kind of, grotesque, and now they're sort of, the butt of many jokes. Like, these old aspic recipes that everyone looks at and is like, "Ugh, it's disgusting." So I think aside from just, articulating regional cultures, they give us a good, insight into our cultural history as well.

[00:06:23]

[00:06:24] Katie Livingston: I think every cookbook, any written thing, right, will have some kind of like ideology embedded in it implicitly. The interesting thing about cookbooks is that oftentimes they will explicitly tell you their goals, values, and interests. I know that the one that I wrote about, it had like a very specific kind of mission statement.

[00:06:49] the Grady County Extension Homemaker Cookbook has the intent to, quote, "Help women gain knowledge and improve their skills in home economics and related areas so that the family unit may be strengthened, develop leadership skills, provide community service, promote international understanding, and meet new people."

[00:07:12] So I think the interesting thing that this quote kind of brings out, and that I think is common in a lot of cookbooks, is there's on the one hand sort of this impetus to build and develop their own culture, right? So here they're articulating home economics, the family unit, leadership skills, and community service.

[00:07:30] These are things that they hope, you know, for the women who are utilizing this cookbook to have and develop. And then there's also the interaction with the other. So here it would be like promote international understanding and meet new people. So there's this negotiation of self or in-group, and then other or like external.

[00:07:49] Vida: I was interested to hear more about how cookbooks articulate societal expectations for women or act as sites where they can develop their own culture. Is women's knowledge particularly prone to vanishing, and why is it important to preserve it?

[00:08:05] Katie Livingston: I'm also really interested in, economy and the flow of money and, the transfer of objects that have symbolic monetary value, right? And I think that, you know, when you're specifically looking at women's literature, domestic objects become kind of a proxy for money, finances, wealth, either like literally or symbolically.

[00:08:31] Because this specific juncture, there's of course a lot of women in the workforce, but also it's still like the way that women interact with money is usually highly mediated. So I guess my primary interest, in domestic objects is how they can kind of, carry this financial symbolic, and then they can kind of be more than that as well.

[00:08:53] I'm specifically thinking of... There's this book, it's called, The Female World of Love and Ritual, and it kind of describes how women create cultures around the production and maintenance of, domestic tasks and domestic objects. So think about, the quilting circle or about, handing down kind of, like, family recipes within, small groups of women.

[00:09:21] Domestic objects become kind of an occasion both for, producing economic stability in a way or, showing others that you have a kind of economic stability. Like, the decoration of houses was for upper-class women who would want to, decorate their houses in a specific way and show their, class or, social status.

[00:09:39] But then they also serve, a social function among women to, produce community. So I think, like, the quilting circle is, a really good example of that. And that's another thing that I kind of grew up around that's dying is the, you know, many of the ladies in my family went to quilting circle, and it's just kind of fallen off now.

[00:09:59] There is oftentimes kind of like a gendered element to what we consider, worthy of preserving or valuable in preserving. And I think that a lot of the sort of narratives that I look at, they engage with this question, right? Because often they are, like, sort of things that are written by women, and you'll notice an attention to domestic objects that would, maybe if it were a male author or something, maybe escape their attention.

[00:10:25] So I'm thinking right now specifically of this play called Trifles, and there's... A murder takes place, and the police officers can't figure out kind of who did it. And the women in the community come into the house, and, through reading, the domestic objects, like the cans that Minnie, the main character, was in the process of canning or reading, where she stopped, and it was either, knitting or quilting.

[00:10:55]

[00:10:55] Katie Livingston: they come in and they kind of, like, actually read the domestic objects and, understand what point she was at in the task. And through this, they're able to, like, uncover kind of the what happened or the whodunit or, the mystery. So I think that that's kind of a good example of, what do we find worthy of looking at?

[00:11:15] What do we find worthy of preserving? And also reading or interpreting, right? The question of, what is worthy of reading or interpreting Is very loaded. And so historically, maybe something like a cookbook for, fine dining, I gave the example, of French pastries, right?

[00:11:33] That has an air of like, oh, this is broad. This is culturally important. This is elevated in some way, versus, a little family cookbook might not have the same valence. And the Internet Archive is great about pulling our attention to that which is maybe otherwise disregarded or is so commonplace that we don't even think of it being lost or having the potential for loss

[00:11:58] Vida: I wondered how food culture has changed in the internet era and how this affects the cultural loss Katie mentioned. How has our relationship to recipes evolved, and are there new challenges to preservation?

[00:12:12] Katie Livingston: I think the most interesting thing about how that crops up in cookbooks in particular is it really is a remnant of kind of what I was talking about for most of history, food culture has been... I'm not trying to say that people never wrote down recipes before or anything like that. I'm just talking about before like mass print culture.

[00:12:34] Things were really like handed down amongst family members or orally or written recipes were much more like personalized, as opposed to these kind of like mass commodity recipes, cookbooks, what have you. And so I think like when you're looking at the pages of an individual's cookbook a family cookbook, you get the remnants of this culture around food, which is one of like editing, revision, personalization, and constant change.

[00:13:06] You know? Anybody who's cooking constantly will probably tell you that they make revisions to their own recipes or to the way that they do things all the time, even if unconsciously. And yeah, I thought that this was a good thing to bring out just in terms of the Internet Archive and what the Internet Archive does, right?

[00:13:25] Because there's a huge difference between a book that is just a PDF or an EPUB, right, of something that is in print versus an object that has been interacted with, that has been altered, that has been edited. I feel once a cookbook or like any book takes on revisions, notes, and just you can kind of see the hand of the person who wrote on it or interacted with it, it becomes a different thing entirely.

[00:13:51] Yeah. So I, feel like... I mean, a good example is in the cookbook that I have, my gran kind of interspersed it with clippings from magazines. So she like would take these clippings out of magazines and slot them in the correct section of the cookbook, and thereby creating her own little archive, you know, of recipes that she would have included.

[00:14:18] there's even one section where she like cut out a recipe and pasted it over an existing recipe, so combined these two recipes through like literal altercation of the text, right? Like the cutting and pasting thing. So yeah, I think it just kind of... it changes, not only tells you about sort of your family history or shows the actual work of revision, it makes the something entirely new, different, unique

[00:14:48] Yeah, I think the biggest concern, particularly in the context of the Culture Report, is the dominance of the food blog, right?

[00:14:59] This is something that, has the valence of a curated, like in the way that a cookbook would curate something, you know? It has that kind of valence of, "Oh, I'm gonna have a cookbook," or, "I'm gonna have a cooking blog about Southern food," right? "And I'm gonna put all my recipes in here."

[00:15:19] But because it's not a material thing, there's no way to show it in the way that I was just talking about. If they go in and sort of change the recipe, alter it, there's no actual like textual or material evidence of that, so that kind of work just like vanishes becomes invisible. And then there's also the issue of because it's not a material thing, there's not really a standardized way of preserving these recipes, so they're kind of just floating out here as their own individual units, and they're subject to being, to like erasure at any moment, even more so than, you know, like a family cookbook.

[00:16:02] And then on top of that, I think that they're ... This isn't necessarily problematic, but just different. They really encourage a different way of interacting with recipes and with food culture, right? Because if you're encountering something in the context of a cookbook, you're not only engaging with the individual recipe, you're engaging with the whole thing.

[00:16:25] And that recipe kind of like exists in the context of that cookbook. Whereas the way that we interact with online recipes is usually like a quick Google search. I'll find this food blogger's, you know, version of whatever I'm trying to cook, and then you probably won't engage with the rest of their content at all.

[00:16:45] So that kind boundary that the cookbook makes, it just disappears. and I think that it's a really different ... way of interacting with recipes and with food culture that it shows in terms of like how my generation, I think, goes about cooking. this is probably just me getting into personal stuff, but most people I know that's

[00:17:09] Most people I know my age don't have like a personal, I guess, recipe book or like archive or collection of recipes that they really like to make and know how to make. I personally have really tried to start doing this because I not only have my family recipes, I also have- Recipes that have become, important to me in other ways because they're things that I've made and my friends or people who are close to me have said, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing.

[00:17:38] Please make it again." And it was just one of these one-off Google searches, you know? I was just like, "Ugh, here's what I have in my pantry. Let me Google something." And then it's "Oh, people actually like this. I like it. Dang, I need to make sure that I don't, lose this recipe." It's so easy to lose things in this, way of interacting with recipes

[00:17:59] Vida: Who knew that a grandma's cookbook could contain so much history? I guess it all depends how you choose to see what's in front of you and what lens you apply to the objects that surround you every day. It was wonderful to hear Katie talk about her perspectives on domestic culture and women's history.

[00:18:18] She managed to make the ordinary into the magical, and I guess this can teach us how we are not always aware of what will have historical relevance in the future.

[00:18:29] Join us again next time when we'll be talking to Brooke Palmieri about queer community archives.