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The way to America’s heart is through its stomach. This cookbook collection even ties in astrology and the mob.
Steve Peterson
It’s accessible by appointment only, and I pass through computerized, locked doors requiring keypad access before coming upon two aisles of books. Roughly 13,000 volumes span nearly 400 years and comprise one of the five or six largest cookbook collections in the United States. I feel privy to an intimate little secret and am now face to face with a prestigious reserve that reflects America itself, in some instances at its most oddball and poignant.
Whole shelves are devoted to cooking on sailboats, on shoestrings, for bachelors, for bachelorettes in search of bachelors, in wartime, in all kinds of sickness, and in health. Whole books are devoted to popcorn (Cornzapoppin’!), to smørrebrød (Danish-style open-face sandwiches — I’ll have the spiced lard-and-meat jelly, please), to mock dishes (think poor man’s caviar, a dip made with beans or eggplant). Books from bed-and-breakfasts on Martha’s Vineyard, square-dancing clubs in Georgia, Beat-era hippies in Haight-Ashbury (“Eat Beat! It’s the way out, Man”), midcentury food manufacturers such as Fluffo (a Crisco rival undoubtedly undone by its awkward name), even celebrity astrologists such as Jeane Dixon — a Nixon confidante whose headnotes claim, among other things, Leos should get plenty of catnip and lotus in their diets, and Cancers must curb over-possessive tendencies: “You’ll take the last piece of cake left on the plate!”
I have arrived at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library. (Husted was a Virginia journalist but no relation to Denver journalist-about-town Bill Husted.)
Just as surfers demur on where the best waves are, and fishermen may keep mum on where the fish are biting, we gastronomes sometimes hoard our hidden gems, be it the neighborhood bistro with the juiciest roast chicken or the late-night takeout joint whose owner knows our order by heart. We’re torn between spreading the wealth and keeping it all to ourselves. But despite the Husted’s accolades, there’s not a lot of foot traffic.
On any given day, there’s just the occasional food fanatic like me scattered among the serious culinary scholars. I guess I can afford to share this find in all its richness.
INK-STAINED CHEF
The Husted’s original stockpile of 7,000 volumes landed on the Penrose dock in 1985 courtesy of Colorado’s Boettcher Foundation, which focuses on enriching state residents and institutions. Part of the surprise for Penrose special collections curator Steve Fisher was that no one told him it was coming. The other part, he adds with a laugh, is that “I am not a big cook. I’ll say to my wife, ‘The curator of the culinary collection is going to make breakfast this morning.’ And then I’ll scramble some eggs.”
The collection’s astounding growth — almost doubling in size since inception — is a result of further donations from such late, great local icons as The Denver Post food editor Helen Dollaghan and mayor Ben Stapleton’s sister-in-law Katie Stapleton, a well-known Denver philanthropist and radio cooking show host. Other donors have been attracted by the attention the collection garners from both the local press and prominent cultural funds such as the Culinary Trust, which this year awarded the collection $2,000 for book restoration, largely on the strength of its most valuable tomes, from groundbreakers such as the first editions of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) and Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking (1931) to a fragile but fittingly still intact 1683 treatise on vegetarianism titled The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness.
When Fisher singles out for mention historical and regional works such as “little local fundraising cookbooks from the First Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas and what have you,” he’s touching on the heart and soul — make that the meat and potatoes — of the collection. It’s the sheer spectrum of finds that makes browsing here so much darn fun and unusually enlightening.
Among my personal favorites is The Mafia Cookbook (1970) by Joe Cipolla (“onion” in Italian), an alleged “master chef for three generations … of dons and capos.” It’s full not only of intriguing recipes such as chestnut-cocoa ravioli but also downright startling black-and-white illustrations of hired guns spraying bullets across the page and stool pigeons dangling from meathooks. Another is The Antisocial Cookbook (1968), whose subtitle reads “150 Mouth-Watering Recipes Celebrating Garlic, Onions, Cheese, Fish, and Other Foods That Tend to Chase Your Friends Away. Made Safe for This Edition by Binaca, the World’s Most Concentrated Breath Freshener/Mouthwash.” Essentially an advertisement, it’s nonetheless utterly charming, what with instructions for “Vicioussoise” and “Brutal Franks.” And let’s not forget The Military Meals at Home Cookbook (1943), rife with recipes for fried mush, pot pie, biscuits, grits, and — what else? — “the army’s eye-opener … steaming hot java with or without sidearms”!
Ask fellow devotee Adrian Miller, meanwhile, and you’ll get a whole different, and fascinating, view of the collection. If that name sounds familiar, it may be because you’ve seen it before in a totally different context: local politics. Miller is a senior analyst in Governor Ritter’s Office of Policy and Initiatives. But he’s also a certified barbecue judge who’s working on a history of soul food, each chapter of which focuses on a different classic, from chicken and waffles to candied yams. Miller notes that the collection houses rare — indeed, sometimes singular — tomes by postbellum African-Americans such as Franklyn Hall’s 300 Ways to Cook and Serve Shellfish and “a number of books by white Southerners about their black cooks that, though they’re racist, have been really informative and eye-opening. The great thing about Husted is that it’s so expansive that, even though I’m researching African-American cooking, I can put it in context: Here’s what was happening in American cooking in general at the same time, so here’s what was different [about black cooking] and here’s what was similar.”
In short, the reference-only Husted Collection is a veritable cultural kaleidoscope: Every glimpse yields a new perspective on our melting pots and pans. That’s true not least because it just keeps growing, in keeping with Fisher’s theory that “the rich get richer. If you’re strong in an area, people donate in that area.” For that matter, so does the cookbook section in the library’s open stacks. With an annual cookery budget of about $10,000, Fisher is able to acquire a couple thousand new and used titles a year, which is all the better for me. Now that I’ve spilled the beans, I’m on my way to the Husted to find a novel way to cook ’em. The lima, Vienna sausage, and mayo concoction I copied from Constance Carr’s Lazy Lady Lunches (1968) is wearing a bit thin.
