The collection includes highly curated regional cookbooks, Junior League and church cookbooks, community collections, family books and other volumes that preserve foodways in very different ways.

Some tell us how to stage an entire occasion. Others give us six versions of the same casserole.

Both are useful.

As the project grows, I’m cataloging the books and their recipes as a corpus so I can look not only at individual dishes, but also at what repeats across books, places and decades.

That’s where some of the most interesting questions begin.

I’m particularly interested in questions like these:

• What did people cook, and what ingredients were available to them?
• Which dishes endured, and which disappeared?
• Which recipes appear again and again, either within one cookbook or across a region?
• What do the instructions assume the cook already knows?
• How did food move between restaurants and home kitchens?
• What did people serve together, and for what occasions?
• What do contributors, menus, headnotes, illustrations and even cookbook covers tell us beyond the recipes themselves?
• Whose contributions were overlooked, obscured or left unnamed, and what evidence can help us find and understand the knowledge that the surviving record makes easier to miss?
• Which old dishes deserve another look?
• And when they do, what should we preserve, what should we adapt, and what can we learn even if we never make them again?

There won’t always be a tidy answer. And that’s part of the fun.

As this project grows, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the surviving cookbook record does not represent every community equally. If Cooking the Past Forward is going to say anything meaningful about community cooking, the corpus has to reflect more than the communities that had the easiest access to publishing, printing, distribution and preservation.

An absence from the published cookbook record is not an absence of food knowledge. It may tell us something about who had access to publishers, committees, libraries and institutional archives, and whose knowledge traveled through other channels.

That knowledge may survive in handwritten recipe cards, family notebooks, clipped recipes, church kitchens, oral histories, remembered measurements, holiday traditions and dishes learned by watching someone else cook. Those sources belong in this project, too.

Because I’ve been largely unable to find them, I’m especially interested in finding culinary records from Black, Hispanic and Latino, Indigenous and other underrepresented churches, families, schools, tribal communities, civic groups and neighborhoods. But the invitation is broader than that. If your family has an old cookbook, recipe card, kitchen notebook, menu, photograph or food story that preserves something worth remembering, I’d love to hear about it.

Avoiding the subject would also be a choice, and one that would quietly reproduce the cookbooks’ original silences.

Already Catalogued in the Research Corpus

• 40th Anniversary Cookbook: A Book of Favorite Recipes. United Methodist Women of Lake Vista United Methodist Church; probably published in 1988.
• Fifth Sunday: A Collection of Recipes. McIntosh United Methodist Women; published 1984.
• First – You Make a Roux. Les Vingt Quatre Club for the Lafayette Museum Association; first published 1954.
• Galveston Gourmet 1982–1983: Historical Galveston—Recipes from the Kitchens of the Resiterns. UTMB Resiterns; published 1982.
• The Galveston Island Cookbook. Women of Trinity Episcopal Church; published 1975.
• Gourmet’s Guide to New Orleans: Creole Cookbook and Directory of New Orleans Restaurants. Elaine Douglass Jones and Claitor’s Publishing Division; first published 1933, with a 1983 printing in the collection.
• Home Town Recipes. Friends of St. Charles Parish; undated, probably published after 1983.
• Lagniappe: A Little Something Extra. Junior League of Beaumont; published 1982.
• The Legends of Louisiana Cookbook: The Cuisine of New Orleans and Its Colorful History. Sheila E. Ainbinder; first published by the American Cooking Guild in 1987.
• Louisiana Entertains: Menus and Recipes from the Rapides Symphony Guild. Rapides Symphony Guild; first published 1978.
• Rare Collection: Superb Recipes by the Junior League of Galveston County. Junior League of Galveston County; first published 1985.
• Recipes and Reminiscences of New Orleans: Old Ursuline Convent Cookbook. Parents Club of Ursuline Academy; first published 1971.
• The Shadows-On-The-Teche Cookbook: Cuisine of the Cajun Country—Hospitality, A Tradition along the Bayou. Shadows Service League; first published 1982.
• Southern Sideboards: Jackson, Mississippi. Junior League of Jackson; first published 1978.
• Talk About Good!. Junior League of Lafayette; first published 1967.
• Texas Tapestry: Weaving Together the Flavors of Texas. Houston Junior Woman’s Club; first published 1995.
• To a King’s Taste: Carnival of Recipes—Favorite Recipes of Carnival Kings and Queens. National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Louisiana; first published 1952.
• What’s Cookin’ in Cedar Lawn: Galveston Island, Texas. Cedar Lawn Garden Club Beautification Committee; published 1996.

In the Collection, Awaiting Intake

TBD! The larger collection includes many more vintage and community cookbooks waiting to join the research corpus. I’m completing a shelf-by-shelf inventory now, so stay tuned as this list grows.