Cookbook Collector Savors Recipes for Living in Michigan
What has become ever clearer in recent years is that Longone — though she herself has never been a professional chef nor restaurateur nor author — is just as much an icon of gastronomic history as any of those who worked with pans or pens. The JBLCA’s collection of 25,000 items that Longone collected throughout her lifetime, has drawn to Ann Arbor a constant stream of authors and researchers interested in what people ate, how they prepared it, and what that implies about the societies and cultures of countless times and places. One history graduate student used the archive for dissertation research, examining how, for instance, the presence or absence of raisins in kugel or sugar in gefilte fish reflect American Jews’ shifting relationship to their European heritage.
