A Tale of Two Cities: Community Cookbooks and Urbanization in California at the Turn of the 20th Century

Cookbooks from the past offer a view into the aspirations and opinions, the politics, and the culture of the people who wrote them. The collected works of a community, taken over time, are a valuable chronicle of the change that takes place as it grows and expands. The cookbooks produced by various charities in Stockton and Sacramento, California at the turn of the 20th Century are filled with recipes, attributes, ephemera, and advertising that trace the growth and urbanization of these places following the Gold Rush era in Northern California. These charity, or “community,” cookbooks serve as historical documents that record changes in types of food that were eaten, the nature of home food production, the size of the community, and the influence of industrialization as these cities grew from local stagecoach stops to large metropolitan centers.

About the speaker:

Kate Helfrich is a career educator with a background in nutrition and food studies and a passion for cooking and wise eating. She spends her time exploring cookbooks and recipes and is a University of California Master Food Preserver, teaching classes throughout the Sacramento region. In 2016 she was selected to participate in a seminar on “Reading Historic Cookbooks” through the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. Her master’s thesis on community cookbooks at the turn of the 20th Century led to an invitation to speak as part of the American Bookbinders Museum (San Francisco) series on recipes and cookbooks in America and to a series of collaborative writing projects.