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Date: May 23, 2013
Time: 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Light refreshments at 5:30 p.m., Lecture at 6:00 p.m.; Special reception for current Friends of the Rare Book Room immediately following the lecture.
Speaker(s):
Stephen Schmidt
Location: The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York, NY 10029
From roughly 1600 to 1900, many women (and a few men) in the English-speaking world compiled personal recipe collections in bound notebooks. These manuscript cookbooks contain a wealth of information absent from most printed cookbooks: where and from whom the recipes were collected; nonstandard but possibly common ways of substituting expensive or rare ingredients or circumventing tricky or time-consuming techniques; the type of cooking vessel of the size, shape and number of baking pans used in the preparation of recipes; the management of the fire or oven; the contexts in which dishes were served and the ways in which they were presented at table. Sometimes manuscript cookbooks can also tell us which dishes were truly popular and regularly eaten in a period, although in the past, as today, many more recipes were collected than were actually ever made. This talk will disucss the pleasure and profit to be gained from studying manuscript cookbooks and will also touch on the complicated relationship between these documents and printed cookbooks. Examples of manuscript recipe books and related printed cookbooks from NYAM's rare book collection will be on display for attendees to see.
About the Speaker(s)
Stephen Schmidt is the principal researcher and writer for The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, an online survey of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks held in U.S. libraries and other institutions, and is also a personal chef and cooking teacher in New York City, where he lives. He is the author of Master Recipes, a 940-page general-purpose cookbook, was an editor of and a principal contributor to the 1997 and 2006 editions of Joy of Cooking, has contributed to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink and Dictionnaire Universel du Pain, and has written for Cook's Illustrated magazine and many other publications. He is currently working on Lemon Pudding, Watermelon Cake, and Miracle Pie, a history of American home dessert with recipes.
Registration Information
Cost: Free, but advance registration is required
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