Community cookbooks open a fascinating window into 150 years of American food, culture, and homelife.
About the Podcast
You know these cookbooks, and you probably have at least one in your kitchen.
They’re collections of home cooked recipes, put together by church groups, synagogues, school groups, political organizations, band boosters, and even biker gangs. They’re held together with stitches, comb binding, staples, or string. They’re photocopied, mimeographed, handwritten, sometimes typed out page by page. All of these books are defined by a community, with recipes collected from that community, and put together with the goal of raising money to benefit a cause within the community. These cookbooks are endlessly interesting. They illuminate various communities, share heartfelt recipes, and demonstrate creativity and grassroots publishing. Existing at the intersection of technology, home economy, food safety, advertising and marketing, they bring more than 150 years of American history to life.
The three of us (hosts Margaret Hathaway, Karl Schatz, and Don Lindgren) collaborated on publishing the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook in 2020. As we've delved deeper into these marvelous books, we’ve discovered a shared passion for these fascinating and humble cookbooks. This podcast was created to share this love with others, and to talk seriously about a type of publishing that is so often tucked in the margins.
In each episode we'll look at a single community cookbook and examine it as a physical object, a reflection of community, and a source of recipes from a very specific time and place. We’ll talk about why it’s interesting and what it says about the community it came from. We’ll also interview special guests with a connection to the book, and we’ll try a recipe or two from the cookbook’s pages.
In season one we're focusing on community cookbooks from Maine. In season two we'll begin to bounce around the USA in search of the country's most interesting community cookbooks!
About the Hosts
Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz are the wife and husband team behind six books on food and farming, including the memoir The Year of the Goat, the guide Living With Goats, two volumes of the Portland, Maine Chef’s Table cookbook, and most recently the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook. Margaret is a writer and goat farmer. In addition to being the author of six books, she is a regular contributor to Taproot Magazine, and has worked in cookbook publishing and as manager of New York’s landmark Magnolia Bakery. Karl is a photographer, journalist, and goat farmer. He has worked as a Digital Producer at ABC Television, a Photo Editor at Time Magazine, and as Director of Aurora Photos. Since 2005, the couple has lived with their three daughters on Ten Apple Farm, their homestead and agritourism business in southern Maine, where they raise dairy goats, tend a large garden and small orchard, lead goat hikes, teach workshops, and operate a guest house. You can visit them at tenapplefarm.com, or on Instagram @tenapplefarm.
Don Lindgren is an antiquarian bookseller specialized in printed and manuscript books about food and drink. His bookselling business, Rabelais Inc., acquires, researches, and sells rare books, manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials related to culinary history. He has served as a Governor of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. He has lectured or presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and the Rare Book School’s Boston Seminar. In 2019 he published the first part of a multi-volume exploration of the American community cookbook, titled UnXld: American Cookbooks of Community & Place. Visit him at rabelaisbooks.com.