ISSUE 12, CLASSIC COOKBOOKS, Part 3: Jennie June 1866
A Cookbook from the Strongest of Strong-Minded Women
A Cookbook from the Strongest of Strong-Minded Women
I don’t collect cookbooks. (I’m too aware of the dangers that would arise if I systematically went about acquiring significant cookbooks—I would be a completist and bankrupt myself). But I have studied hundreds of pre 1920 cookbooks and have a list of favorites—volumes that always surprise, always offer more than you remembers. If I were to start a collection, one of the first volume’s I would purchase is Jennie June’s American Cookery Book, published in 1866.
Why get this one? Well it is the one cookbook that emerged from the heart of the women’s suffrage movement, by one of its leader’s, the journalist June Cunningham Croly, in the years of its nativity. It appeared two decades before Hattie Burr’s Women’s Suffrage Cookbook of 1886—usually identified as the first women’s suffrage cookery manual. It contains a section of recipes for “Strong Minded Women” as well as a selection of recipes by celebrated American women of the mid-19th century.
Croly, one of the first active woman journalists in the United States, was a driving spirit of the cultural wing of the woman’s movement—founding the New York City Sororis Club, the model of the women’s clubs that would become ubiquitous in America in the decades after the Civil War. (A selection of recipes associated with the Sororis Club, albeit created by the chefs at Delmonico’s, appears in the Cookbook ) Croly wrote the great history of American Women’s Clubs at the end of the 19th century. She was greatly drawn to the religious perfectionism of the Oneida Community (a collection of their recipes appears in the cookbook), complex marriage, and free love. Her husband David was a utopian socialist, follower of John Humphrey Noyes, yet also an unapologetic racist who campaigned against miscegenation. Their son Henry Croly founded The New Republic Magazine.
From a culinary viewpoint, the cookbook is interesting because it attempts to be something more than a nominally American cookbook. It is a forerunner of a kind of cookbook that would become pronounced after the American Centennial and after chef James Parkinson had published his manifesto on American food. It seeks out information on the food of various communities and places particular to the United States—American Jews for instance—or regional specialties such as South Carolina Sweet Cake, Boiled Yankee Plum Pudding, Nantucket Corn Pudding, New York Mock Duck, Roast Prairie Chicken, Deviled Turkey Legs, Trenton Falls Fry, Cape Cod Chowder, Gumbo, etc. Yes—there are the cosmopolitan sections on carving and pastry that appear in all cookbooks of the era. But there is so much more, both in terms of content and attitude.
Here is her cookbook in a form that can be downloaded as a pdf: https://books.google.com/books?id=TsdQAQAAIAAJ&pg=PR5&dq=jennie+junes+cookbook&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwikzdbrwYTYAhUGct8KHaJGAsMQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=jennie%20junes%20cookbook&f=false