The University of Iowa boasts the third largest culinary book collection in the country. It began in the '90s with a gift from Louis Szathmary, a Hungarian immigrant who became a well-known chef in Chicago. He collected thousands of culinary books from Western Europe and at the end of his life decided to donate them to the University of Iowa.
“I wish I could say that was based on us having some incredible culinary institution or something like that. But actually it was that one of his best friends was the head of dining service,” said Eric Ensley, who has been the curator of rare books and maps at the University of Iowa for the last four years.
The collection includes 15,000 items, and contains printed books, handwritten manuscripts from as far back as the late 1500s and documents about food issued by the U.S. government and corporations.
“With something like Thanksgiving, something that you can really pull out of the collections is how complicated the history of Thanksgiving is,” said Ensley, who set a table in the UI library with a selection of Thanksgiving-related texts. “There's a lot of different threads that get pulled together into the history.”
Turkey, for example, is today the star dish of a Thanksgiving feast, but it wasn’t always that way.
The collection includes one of the first appearances of a turkey in an encyclopedia after American colonizers learned of Indigenous Americans eating turkey. After observing this, they wrote back to Europeans about the bird, which is native to the Americas.
“During the Civil War, actually, Lincoln proclaimed the first big Thanksgiving Day where people took the day off in 1863, but the menu wasn’t settled at that time. You ate what was harvested at that time, and that might vary from place to place,” Ensley said. “And if we're looking to, well, why do we eat turkey? Why do we eat yams? Why do we eat sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, with the crunchy onions on top? That's back to the early 1900s... where corporations were basically creating this holiday and branding this holiday, and that's what enters the public imagination.”
Campbell’s Soup Company published documents with casserole recipes including their products, and groups like the National Turkey Federation encouraged eating turkey on holidays and every day.
Ensley also pulled a book with instructions on preparing feasts for high-class English families. The practices in those books are emulated in Thanksgiving dinners today.
“Life is built on this cultural and historical accretion that if you bother to take the time to look at it closely, you get some really interesting story of people and history and civilizations — and complicated ones as well,” he said. “Thanksgiving doesn't come from one place. It's a bunch of different strands that happen to arrive to what we're doing today.
Ensley and his colleagues at the library have tried out a few of the recipes found within the handwritten books from the last several hundred years, but perfecting the taste can be challenging. The recipes often include vague instructions and imprecise measurements.
However, the cocktail recipes, which use ratio measurements, still hold up. Ensley said this can be a handy resource around the holidays too.
