Sometimes the homeliest daily chores and most taken-for-granted possessions can reveal cultural trends, personal stories, and anthropological discoveries—if you study them like Juli McLoone does.
Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
“Food helps us understand people and society,” says McLoone, a U-M special collections curator whose responsibilities include the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive (JBLCA). “It dictates how we relate to the world—how we raise and harvest food, what we eat, how we eat, with whom, and where.”
It’s a passion she shared with the collection’s creator, Jan Longone. A foodie before the name was invented, Longone donated more than 20,000 kitchen-related items to the U-M in 2000 and remained its assistant curator until her death in 2022. The collection has an enormous array of materials, including kitchen tools, appliance manuals, and advertising ephemera, but most are cookbooks.
“I love beautiful, elaborate, pristine cookbooks with engraved frontispieces,” says McLoone, a young mother of two. “I also love ratty cookbooks with dog-eared pages where someone’s child scribbled. I love cookbooks offering gourmet feasts and cookbooks that share three recipes for nearly identical cakes because the contributors were more important than unique recipes.”
McLoone grew up in Indiana, and some of her earliest memories are Saturday morning pancake breakfasts made with her oldest brother. The recipe called for stiffly beaten egg whites, and he would “test” them by tipping the bowl upside-down over the delighted three-year-old’s head. But she credits her mother with her appreciation for fine foods.
“My mother makes amazing beef stew, fried chicken, and Cornish pasties, but she is known especially as a baker,” McLoone says. “I grew up with the aromas of baking bread and scones, muffins, fruit pies, and elaborate birthday cakes.
“Part of the magic of Christmas morning would be waking up to the dining room table covered with a lace tablecloth loaded with platters of Swedish Tea Ring, sugar cookies, lebkuchen, cardamon, cookie press, Christmas cookies, chocolate pecan brownies iced with crushed peppermint on top—and more.”
McLoone earned an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology and English literature from Indiana University, then two master’s degrees from the University of Iowa: one in library and information science, the other in cultural anthropology. In her first job at the University of Texas at San Antonio, as a rare-books librarian, she frequently demonstrated historical cooking based on the university’s Mexican Cookbook Collection. She came to the U-M in 2015 to oversee the university’s post-1700 rare books, the JBLCA, and several other special collections.
Born in Boston in 1933, Longone was raised in “a Jewish household where the table was the center of existence,” she told the Observer in 1980. Her collection started with a lifetime subscription to Gourmet magazine—a gift from her husband, Dan, when they were grad students at Cornell. They moved to Ann Arbor in 1959, when Dan joined the U-M faculty.
As the collection grew, Jan helped establish the American Institute of Wine & Food, authored entries on American cookbook history for The Oxford Companion to Food, and with friends, founded the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor. Dan, who passed away in January, founded the Ann Arbor Wine and Food Society, and together he and Jan taught classes on food and wine.
The earliest American cookbook in the collection, Amelia Simmons’ American cookery, features New England specialties like “Indian pudding” and “jonnycake.” Published in 1796, its scope is advertised in its subtitle: the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry and vegetables, and the best modes of making puff-pastes, pies, tarts, puddings, custards and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plumb to plain cake. McLoone says it’s also significant for promoting the use of pearlash, a precursor of baking soda that “launched a revolution in cake-making.”
Another treasure is Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. The first known cookbook written by a Black American, it was published by a newspaper in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended. In it, Russell describes how she and her disabled son fled to Michigan in 1864 after their Tennessee home was raided by white gangs.
“This book is historically significant because of its author and its age, but also because it shows that Black Southern cooking in the mid-nineteenth century was quite sophisticated,” McLoone says. “She has recipes for elegant desserts and sophisticated dishes—but none of the soul food traditionally expected for Southern cuisine.”
One of McLoone’s personal favorites is The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, published in 1886. Contributors included famous names like Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Stone, and Clara Barton. Journalist Mary C. Ames submitted a recipe for lobster soup, while physician Alice B. Stockham sent hers for Caroline Cake. By the late nineteenth century, cookbooks were also providing cleaning hints, health-care tips, child-raising advice, and time-saving methods for household management.
People of all ages and interests visit the JBLCA, McLoone says. U-M classes in English, anthropology, applied liberal arts, and the sciences use the collection. Researchers access it in person or online. Journalist Danielle Dreilinger used its resources recently when writing her well-reviewed The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live.
So what does a culinary archivist serve her own family?
McLoone and her husband, a professor at Oakland University, have two small children, and she concedes, “Sometimes, cooking is about aesthetics and sensory enjoyment. And sometimes it’s just about getting food on the table! Like most working mothers, my weekday meals are typically as easy as I can make them: spaghetti, sandwiches, and soup,” she says, grinning, and confessing that she has been known to open Poppy Cannon’s Can-Opener Cookbook (1951) and Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book (1960).
“I’m sure there will be another season of life when I’ll linger over more complex and historical dishes again,” she laughs.