What is the history of community cookbooks?
A- As I understand, community cookbooks began when pioneer women, handwrote recipes, bound them with string and tossed these primitive collections back and forth to one another as they passed on the prairie in covered wagons. The cookbooks were a simple, but powerful “women’s way” of communication. In the early copies there are recipes of how to treat insect bites, make perfume and even catch a husband. Then the Civil War came and, for the first time, a charitable cause was attached to the book form. Women on both sides again handwrote recipes, bound them with string and sold these receipt books to benefit such causes as battlefield relief and war orphans. Can’t you just see these women “being dismissed” to collect recipes . . . they knew what was hidden behind their culinary talents! With passion and creativity, they used the main role they had at the time, assignment in the kitchen, to improve the lives of widows and children. The birthing of the charity cookbook is a wonderful story
