This month, a new Special Collections exhibit will be going up in the hallway as you approach special collections, on the first floor of Mullins library. Just in time for Thanksgiving, Arkansas from Scratch: Recipes for Changing Communities will highlight Arkansas foodways and the communities that grow up around food.
The exhibit will include both cookbooks, and manuscript collections related to food across the state. Each section of the exhibit will highlight a different facet of Arkansas food, including: technology in the kitchen, Arkansas agri-business, popular crops grown in the state, foodways introduced to the state by different immigrant communities, health and nutrition in Arkansas, and the gendered spaces of food production in the state, from kitchens to hunting camps.
Some of my favorite items that will be included in the exhibit are the Chicken-of-Tomorrow Contest papers, and the Housewife’s Guide and Book of Recipes.
The chicken of tomorrow contest started as a statewide contest in Arkansas intended to help foster innovations in breeding chickens, and thus help the chicken industry sell more chicken. It eventually grew to be a national contest in 1948 and was held in Fayetteville in 1951. The winning chickens of this contest helped shape the chicken industry, and served to encourage consumers to purchase chicken.
The Housewife’s Guide and Book of Recipes, published by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Second Baptist Church in 1920 illustrates how a woman’s role and cooking go hand in hand, even opening the first page with an amalgamation of the two in its “recipe for an ideal wife.” The poem reads as follows:
“Recipe for an Ideal Wife, composed of twenty five parts;
Take equal parts, five of each, of opportunities and resources; five parts of fine intelligence; five parts of love of home; one part love of society; one part outside amusement; three parts practical economy.
Mix all parts until real happiness is procured and ease, variety, intellectual enjoyment and a genuine comfort from an income that gives another only enough to eat and drink, leaving the one who is not an ideal wife restless and unhappy and in debt for her luxuries”
This poem in particular highlights the characteristics that were thought by many at the time to be not only ideal, but required in women, especially in women who made “good” wives. Being economical is stressed as desirable in housekeeping and cooking, meaning that women are encouraged not to spend too much. The fact that this poem is include in a cookbook says a lot about how cookbooks do more than just provide recipes for dishes, they also serve as a vehicle for spreading and preserving social norms and expectations.
