From Kitchen Gardens to Calabria; The Culinary and Cookery Traditions and Teachers College
Practical Arts to Technical Courses, a (very) Brief History.
The course of study, and the evolution of the school itself, underwent a vast transformation upon its relocation to 120th. The sitting board of trustees that included representatives from such society families as the Vanderbilts’, Rockefeller’s, Trask’s, Macy’s, Choate’s, Olney’s, Milbank’s, and Hyde’s, and under the administrative tutelage of James Earl Russell, merged the praxis of the Practical Arts with the inquiries and quests of “the broad-based scientific approach to human development premised on the interrelationship among three broad areas: education, psychology and health”.
By 1915, the School of Practical Arts had folded into Teachers College broader curriculum under the title “Technical Courses”. This stream of study included the Fine Arts, Household Arts, Industrial Arts, Music and Speech, Nursing and Health, Physical Education, and Practical Science In some estimation, the Household Arts seems to most closely resemble the first iteration of the educational premise, and includes such subdivisions as Foods and Cookery, Nutrition and Food Economics, Textiles and Clothing, Household Arts Education, amongst others (for a full listing, please see Teachers College Bulletin, School of Practical Arts Announcement, 1915-1916, available in Teachers College Digital Collections).
A close look at photos from the Historical Photograph of Teachers College Collection, available via Teachers College Digital Collections, offers a unique glimpse into the student body, facilities, and technical aspects of the classes themselves. While the publications indicates the merging of theory and praxis as illustrated by Annotated list of books relating to household arts and Ninety tested : palatable and economical recipes respectively.
Foods and Cookery
From the Teachers College Bulletin, School of Practical Arts Announcement (1915-1916), students could choose from 26 courses, with additional availability in the summer months. They were requested to wear “white clothing; plain skirt, tailored waist, plain white collar, no color in ties or bows of neckwear; long plain white apron with bib…little if any jewelry” and could expect to learn, by hands on facilitation, a variety of skills and applications as related to not only that of forming recipes—though it certainly was, especially in the summer program—but also the history, administration, and etiquette of table service, and other applied principles such as institutional cookery, catering, and for social workers.
The formalization of the household arts, specifically of foods and cookery, provided the opportunity to more widely integrate food preparation and administrating of the courses into areas such as nutrition and nursing (see such courses as “Cooking for Invalids”), but was also a vehicle to creating a robust and useful collection of recipe and cookbooks that are now housed in Gottesman Libraries Special Collections.
Dating back to 1517 (Opera noua chiamata Epulario), the collection includes both manuscripts and monographs that span subjects and geographies from Italian Renaissance to Pennsylvania Dutch, from seemingly esoteric recipes for dog bites to the preparation of entire kitchens for administration under the aristocracy.
Take for instance, The art of cookery, made plain and easy ; which far exceeds any thing of the kind ever yet published, written by Hannah Glasse of England in 1747. In the Introduction, Glasse lays out the nature and goal of the cookbook as
I have attempted a Branch of Cookery which Nobody has yet thought worthwhile to
write upon: But as I have both ſeen, and found by Experience that the Generality of
Servants are greatly wanting in that Point, therefore I have taken upon me to
inſtrucþ them in the beſt Manner I am capable
Glasse goes on to apologize for withgoing the high style of speech and writing as he intends to “inſtrucþ the lower Sort”, as he professes further in Chapter 1, “Of Roaſting, Boiling, &c”:
profeſs’d Cooks will find Fault with touching upon a Branch of Cookery which they
never thought worth their Notice, is what I expecþ : However, this I know, it is the
moſt neceſſary Part of it; and few Servants there are, that know how to Roaſt and
Boil to Perfecþtion
Glasse includes precise instructions on the roasting of all sorts of fowls and game, the French method of dressing, side dishes, puddings, pies, fast-dinners, slow-dinners, dinners for the sick, dinners for the Captain of Ships (including a “Catchup to keep Twenty Years”, as well as all manners of pickling, fermenting, jellying, wine-making, and jarring.
The final coda of The Art of Cookery even includes A Certain Cure for the Bite of A Mad Dog which requires “the patient be blooded from the arm nine or ten ounces” and includes the application of numerous herbs as proffered by one Dr. Mead, a subscriber of Glasse’s book.
Behind the Culinary
The formal education offered by Teachers College in the Household Arts, including Food and Cookery, provided students the necessary interdisciplinary—in both quantitative and qualitative terms—skills applicable across many fields requiring service in the areas of nutrition, sustenance, diet, and care.
Yet, there is another fork to the tradition of cooking, the tradition and concept of the hearth as a place of warmth, gathering, comfort, light, and safety. In essence, it is the location of reciprocal hospitality, sanctuary, and protection.
The oldest of the cookbooks in the Gottesman Libraires Special Collection have all the material qualities afforded printed and bound books: the textured feel of vellum or paper, rough cut edges, a certain brittleness that comes with age, the bindings are often leather and creaking, resistant to give.
There is more than just the object at hand. Upon opening the protective, acid-free layers an olfactory essence can be sensed, it smells subtly of woodsmoke and lard, of memories hidden deep in the amygdala and hippocampus, the areas of the brain most related to emotion and memory. These memories can draw one back to the earliest of times, of childhood, of history, and even towards the pre-history of Teachers College, as the School of Practical Arts.
The Opera Di Bartolomeo Scappi Mastro Dell'Arte Del Cvcinare, written by Scappi Bartolomeo and originally published in 1570, furnishes one of the most detailed record of the cooking of the Italian Renaissance. The book was meant for use in largely aristocratic households with large staff of (male) cooks and helpers and how the complexity of the kitchen tasks would divided and organized, while also offering traditional and emergent recipes of the time, including one of the earliest recipes for turkey, under the name of “India cock and hen". There is much care on Scappi’s part to describe the bird’s size and appearance, indicating that this particular imported fowl from the Americas was not familiar to all.
The engraved plates are an invaluable in illustrating a guide to early Italian kitchen equipment, and taken together with a careful examination of the recipes, facilitates a far more nuanced examination of the culture and technologies of the Renaissance Italy.
Taken as artefacts of the time and place, cook and recipe books have the capacity to offer unique observations that help researchers extract contextual evidence for their inferences and hypothesis’. Often, these books are highly specific to the area and time of origination, drawing on the specific tendencies of class relations, technological availability, that also include the relationship of the natural and the manmade, or the wild and the domestic. Other areas of interest might include insights into the geopolitical topography by tracing the introduction of certain foods, spices, and techniques across time and space.
There is something befitting that so many children’s books revolve around the notion of the hearth, of nourishment. Charles Dickens utilizes the fireplace as a single, central piece in his novella from 1845, The Cricket on the Hearth : a Fairy Tale of Home, while Charles Reade uses the mantle as an analogy the struggle that is faced between the church and familial obligations in The Cloister and the Hearth : A Tale of the Middle Ages.
Another befitting tale of the hearth and cooking takes place in the Italian province of Calabria, where Strega Nona, a wizened wise Woman and folk doctor provides numerous remedies and nourishment for her village.
Archetypally, Strega Nona lives somewhere between the trifecta of The School of Practical Arts, the Renaissance setting of Opera Di Bartolomeo, and the somewhat satirical-tone of The Art of Cookery. As full of moral lessons as it is of hijinks, Strega Nona is an arbiter of justice, saving young Anthony’s neck from the gallows, in turn for a far more fitting punishment that fits the crime of the boiling pot of pasta.
Originally published in 1975, Strega Nona, is a classic children’s tale that have taken on many iterations, but there is always the present pair of Strega Nona and Big Anthony with the latest book—Strega Nona Does It Again—being published in 2013.
In 1977, the original book was made into a short animation. Produced by Weston House Studios, the animation cels were created by Morton Schindel, one of the animation cels used in the production is part of Teachers College Art Collection, and resides here permanently in both a physical and digital format, along with the many others.
The cel depicts Strega Nona and a villager in her kitchen, surrounded by sundries, as small table set for two, a fireplace, and, of course, her magic pot—the idealized version of the aristocrat’s kitchen where food magically appears at the incantations of the Grandma Witch. The scene in the animation cel may suggest an inversion of the power at play between the upper-class aristocracy and the folk traditions of the peasant-class. Here we see the citizen in need of remedies for a persistent headache, and Strega Nona knows just the cure.
The book itself also conducts a moral lesson, as the young Big Anthony misuses the pot in order to impress the local citizenry with a feast of infinite pasta. Yet, this act of plenty turns to a disastrous consequence as the village begins to slowly drown in the pasta, that only Strega Nona knows how to turn off.
For Strega Nona, the kitchen is the land of plenty from whence no technological artifice nor design might impede nourishment, where lessons taught come from the depths of an almost esoteric knowledge handed down by a community of other Strega's, generation by generation. In some ways, 9 University, the Kitchen Garden School, and resulting Teachers College, all sit firmly in that tradition, legitimized in its pedagogy, and while perhaps a few degrees removed from the humble folk traditions of Calabria, no less magical or crucial in knowledge and revelation.
