Back in February 2020, Dr. Alex Ketchum brought her class GSFS 401: Food, Gender, and Environment on a field trip to McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections. We shared a blog post recounting the class visit and the materials that McGill's archivists and librarians shared. The Historical Cooking Project then published blog posts by some of the students who wrote about the materials they saw. Two years later, Ketchum is teaching the class again (a public version of the syllabus is available here) and her new group of students got to go to Rare Books and Special Collections again.
On February 15, 2022, Elis Ing and Mary Yearl explained McGill's holdings in Rare Books and the Osler Library. McGill has primarily Canadian early to mid- 20th century cookbooks. The main types of materials are community and commercial cookbooks and domestic management guides and home economics texts. McGill's menu collection focuses on Montreal during the 20th century. These resources are available to the public and are searchable on the online catalogue ROAAr. Some of the resources have been digitized and are available via the Internet Archive. You do not have to be affiliated with McGill to make an appointment to view these materials.
After the presentation about McGill's holdings, a discussion about emotion in the archive, and a demonstration of how to handle archival materials, the students had the opportunity to then interact with the books and pamphlets. The oldest material the students saw was a 7th century BCE Assyrian Medical tablet. This generated a discussion about how materials make it into the archives, the overlap between food and medical history, and the appropriateness of institutions having certain artifacts.
Class ended with a group discussion in which students shared their findings. The students were encouraged to think about questions of authorship, class, access, ingredients, identity, format, subject matter, publisher and more!
In the coming days, the Historical Cooking Project will publish posts by students sharing some of their own findings.
