News item published on: 2021-09-30 09:55:00

orange check background, with an open book that is worn lying next to a red napkin with a wooden spoon and fork. Text reads, Re-pasts: Community Cookbooks as Collective Memory, Annual Cookbook Lecture.

Join food and cookbook enthusiasts on Thursday, October 28 for "Re-Pasts: Community Cookbooks as Collective Memory,” the Moorman Professorship 2019-21 Lecture and the Annual University Libraries Culinary Lecture presented by Dr. Andrew P. Haley, associate professor of history in the School of the Humanities. Refreshments will begin at 6 p.m. with the lecture to follow at 6:30 p.m. in Cook Library room 209A.

Created by church and civic groups to raise funds, community cookbooks often outlast the causes they were written to support. Housed on kitchen shelves, in boxes in the attic, or in library archives, these pragmatic publications, over time, have become repositories of our culinary past, preserving the names of fabled cooks and recipes for storied dishes. In this talk, Andrew Haley considers the methods that writers of community cookbooks used to preserve culinary traditions and the ways in which our present nostalgia for their cooking too often distorts their legacy.

The lecture will be accompanied by a potluck snack featuring recipes from the 1948 Booneville Presbyterian Cook Book. Attendees are encouraged to prepare a recipe from the cookbook available online.

This event is free and open to the public.

To sign up for a recipe or for more information, contact Jennifer Brannock, University Libraries' Curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana, at 601.266.4347 or .