This week I had the pleasure of bringing my class to visit the Georgia Tech Library Archives to explore some of the collection as we began our research unit on communal writing. The goal of the course is to get students thinking about how we, as researchers, write about and contextualize writing genres which are not clearly owned by one person, but instead are created communally over time (an apt skill for a food writing scholar!). During our visit we explored different artifacts whose authorship is unknown and contested—including one 18th century manuscript for recipes and medical preparations titled “Mrs. Gifford's Receipt Book.” Like many cookbooks, this manuscript was the result of multiple authors as evidenced by the different handwriting and attributions throughout the text. My students were fascinated by the age of the book, the handwriting, and a little fearful of the delicate nature of the physical text. Like most of my classroom visits to the archive, my main goal is to get my students excited about primary source research and show them the importance of preservation work. However, as a scholar invested in issues of power, culture, and food I also see the archives as an important site for investigating whose cooking literacies, food knowledges, and stories are represented and how we might push back against quick and simple citational practices that seek out the first (often dominant) record for credit.
In my previous post, “Working with Recipes in the Writing Classroom: Who Owns a Recipe,” I discussed the politics of recipe ownership and how this impacts the food writing classroom. Today, I want to reflect on how we can use archives as a site to explore these tensions further. One goal of my current course, Who Owns Writing: Authorship in the Digital Age, is to draw connections between controversies in the present-day (such as the ethics of AI and remix) to authorship problems in the past. Essentially to see how contested authorship and communally owned genres are not just a feature of digital writing, but has long been an issue with genres like recipes which were not always recorded and attributed through “traditional” (i.e. white, institutional, or copyright) means. Archives can be an excellent place to explore these issues, because they offer us insight into how “ownership” has changed over time, how recipes have been remixed or copied without attribution, and whose voices have been preserved and whose are absent.
For example, unknown manuscripts like “Mrs. Gifford's Receipt Book” are complicated. Although an archive may know who the original owner or even maker of the text was—writing down a recipe is a lot different than developing one. While the recipe book contains instructions it contains little context as to where a recipe comes from or how it was created. Citing this text for a recipe like “pickled onions” may be a good starting place for tracing the recipe over time, but it doesn’t tell us much about which communities contributed to the dish. Instead of attempting to pin down a singular author or the original owner of a recipe or cookbook, I encourage my students to develop more nuanced citational practices which trace how ownership has changed over time and critically reflect on how power has influenced who is usually given credit. Although students sometimes think of primary sources as the original authority on a piece of writing—cooking genres remind us that a primary document does not equal primary ownership… Being the first to record a recipe doesn’t equate to being the sole author and archives sadly don’t always have all the answers. It can however provide some and I’m hopeful that this semester my students will learn how to question and contextualize sources to gain a deeper understanding of who owns a piece of writing.
If you’re interested in reading more about archives, cookbooks, and ownership, check out some of the selected readings below:
An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States by Lauren F. Klein
“Cooking in the Archives: Bringing Early Modern Manuscript Recipes into a Twenty-First-Century Kitchen” by Alyssa Connell, Marissa Nicosia
Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen
“Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks” from the Internet Archive Blogs
“Using Recipe Archives for Place-Based Research and Writing” by Ashley M. Beardsley, Writing Spaces
“No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom” by Kathryn G. Matheny, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
Call for Pedagogy Resources:
One goal of this website is to build community resources for teaching at the intersection of food and rhet/comp. Have you incorporated food into your rhetoric and composition class? Consider contributing your materials to this website. Syllabi, assignments, examples, and readings are all welcome. You can submit resources via this Google Form.