BRUNSWICK, Maine — “Cookbooks are like auto repair manuals,” antiquarian bookseller Don Lindgren said last week at Bowdoin College. Both get under the hood and show how things really work.
Much is revealed through the rare collection of 735 cookbooks on display in a new show at the college’s library called “What to Eat and How to Cook It: A Celebration of the Esta Kramer Collection of American Cookery.” The books demonstrate the progression of cooking from 1772 to the 1960s in this compendium of American culture.
Acquired by Damariscotta resident Esta Kramer, who bequeathed the historical cache to the college, instructions such as “How to dress a calve’s head — turtle fashion” in cookbook “American Cookery” — which tell the cook to scald its head and feet, take out the brains and “sever out the bones” — shed light on an age wherein women performed daily, demanding, physical work in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, titles such as “The Bachelor and the Chafing Dish,” “The American Woman’s Home” and “Fish, Flesh and Fowl” capture intimate details of how people lived at specific times through history.
Half cooking, half domestic advice, the volumes extend beyond the kitchen to include recipes for hair tonic, varnish for the hoofs of horses, human medical recipes, candies, toothpaste and how to make butter.
Lindgren, who owns Rabelais in Biddeford, catalogued the collection and sold it to Kramer, said “it’s very unusual and amazing what was expected of women.”
By perusing the collection, which consists of books behind glass and those you can take in hand, “you get to see that whole change from America going from a frontier land where people are homesteading to moving into a place that doesn’t exist yet and setting up households and farming and hunting,” Lindgren said. “By the end of the century, you have people living in urban environments. There are big changes in industry, technology, and you can see it all through the books of this collection.”
One of the most historically significant books in the collection is “The Frugal Housewife,” by Susannah Carter and published in 1772. It includes chicken carving instructions engraved by Paul Revere.
“It’s an important part of Americana; there are crooked pages, you can see where the cuts go, the book was just a useful thing,” Lindgren said, underscoring these manuals as workbooks for homemaking.
Through notes on brewing, pickling, preserving “and the management of canary birds” in a pre-classic Civil War guide to domestic arts, history comes alive in a visceral, ingredient-splattered way.
Bowdoin College President Clayton Rose said the collection has scholarly and cultural value that “knit us together as a people.” He added that the cookbooks are “a real marker of life as a family.”
Such deep American history was not lost on the crowd at the opening on Thursday, Jan. 21. Standing in line to meet the 87-year-old Kramer, Kathryn Sheehan of Scarborough agreed with the college president’s remarks.
“I love to cook, I love to bake and I like the history. If you read old cookbooks, you can feel the Civil War, how families lived and the different ways of life back then,” she said.
Clues to how early American homesteaders sustained themselves, socially and nutritionally, are everywhere in the exhibit.
E. A. Howland’s “The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book,” published in 1845, centers on Yankee frugality and thrift.
The essay “A Hint for the Working Class” begins: “If a man, twenty-one years of age, begin to save a dollar a week, and put it to interest every year, he would have, at thirty-one years of age, six hundred and fifty dollars … and at seventy-one, eleven thousand five hundred dollars.”
Teaching an orphan or servant how to cook, make candles or toothpaste were survival guides as well as primers to a brighter future. Other books, published by church groups as fundraisers for soldiers returning from war, are time capsules of an empathetic middle class.
“Charitable cookbooks started around the Civil War, when people came back from war and hadn’t eaten, [and] they were starving,” Lindgren said.
He said many of these cookbooks are filled with recipes for baked goods, because “everyone knew how to cook a fish.”
The first cookbook published in Maine, “Fish, Flesh and Fowl,” published in 1877, “represents what a group of women in Portland, Maine, ate in the 1870s and liked to cook,” Lindgren said.
Compiled by the Ladies of the State Street Parish in Portland, “each recipe contained in this book has been thoroughly tested and proved good,” the subtitle declares.
Despite the title, the book emphasizes breads, cakes, baked goods, preserves and candies. Some recipes include wine as an ingredient, a risky choice during prohibition.
This voluminous show will provide a revealing picture on how people lived their lives and what was in their home, their kitchen and on the end of their fork.
“What was going on in those communities at the time of technological changes,” Lindgren said, “from woodstoves to coal stoves,” is revealed through this culinary century, “where everything is prepared at home.”
To Lindgren, “if you are interested in American history, cultural studies, history of women and religion, there is a big piece of this collection that can engage you and you can learn.”
Sampling hors d’oeuvres from her collection prepared by the campus dining team last week, Kramer put the edible opus into perspective.
“It’s delicious,” she laughed.
The Esta Kramer Collection of American Cookery is on view through June 5 at the Bowdoin College Library. It is free and open to the public.
