ANN ARBOR—After decades of gathering materials and hunting down leads for hard-to-find collectibles, Janice and Daniel Longone’s long investigative journey has yielded a treasure trove of more than 20,000 items relating to American culinary history.

The Longones, whose collection is kept at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, will be honored June 8 in a ceremony sponsored by U-M Provost Teresa Sullivan at the Hatcher Graduate Library on the Ann Arbor campus.

“The Longones’ generous gift provides scholars the opportunity to conduct original research and reinterpret the role of the culinary arts and food-related rituals in American life,” said U-M President Mary Sue Coleman.

Select items from the collection will be on public display in the Audubon Room (Room 100) at the Hatcher Graduate Library, June 1-28. The exhibit is free.

The assorted materials will be preserved in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, named for the curator of American Culinary History at the Clements Library, a pre-eminent depository of American history and culture from the 15th to mid-20th century.

The Longones’ donation, originally announced at the First Biennial Symposium on American Culinary History in 2005, transforms the university’s current culinary collection into one of the most extensive scholarly resources on the subject of American food, cooking and rituals ever assembled.

In addition, the donation comes at a time of widespread and growing academic interest in the culinary arts, as well as public interest as measured by the increasing number of cooking schools, popularity of cooking programs and sales of cookbooks.

Because cooking is inextricably linked to agriculture, class standing, geographic location, ethnic background and technology, the archive offers a “refreshing and different perspective” on American history, says Janice Longone.

Among the thousands of books, menus, advertisements, diaries, graphics, maps, letters, reference works and other ephemera is a collection of early European works that influenced cooking in America. Notable relics include the first American cookbook (1796); the first cookbook published by an African American woman (1866); the first Jewish cookbook published in America (1871); and the first national cookbook, which was published for America’s Centennial in 1876 to answer the oft-asked query, “Have you no national dishes?”

Janice Longone said that intensive study of the archive may also lead to a rethinking of how American agriculture and culinary practices defined regional customs and traditions. The archive includes American imprints in 26 foreign languages, which collectively reflect a “melting pot” and the eclectic flavor of American culture.

“Our hope is we have gathered materials that offer researchers access into a new way of looking at American history,” she said. “That could be the rethinking of the role of women, who were publishing more than 150 years ago charity (fund-raising) cookbooks, which often reflected the pressing issues of the day, or simply, the impact of refrigeration on American tastes and lifestyles.”

The archive has a significant and arguably unparalleled collection of charity cookbooks from every state.

By its nature, the study of culinary history draws on many disciplines, and thereby, will likely provoke scholarly interest from a range of experts in such fields as history, business, the arts, sociology, popular culture and ethnic studies.

Archivists are currently cataloging the massive collection. Scholars interested in examining the archive should contact the Clements Library at (734) 764-2347 or clements.library@umich.edu.

Clements Library