Beyond recipes, cookbooks contain the stories of their creators. Between the pinches of salt and handfuls of sugar, a great-grandmother’s cookies or a 19th-century church group’s cake often reveals something far more precious than a mere dessert.
Here at Gastro Obscura, we live for these stories that hide among ingredients and instructions. Perhaps no place embodies this better than Morris Press, the United States’ largest community cookbook publisher. This year, we visited Morris and combed through their treasure trove of recipe collections authored by groups ranging from bikers to quilters to clowns.
For communities like these, producing a cookbook is often an act of celebration and preservation. From the 18th-century book that helped save the Slovene language to the first recipe collection by and for Central America’s Afro-Indigenous Garifuna community, here are some of our favorite cookbook stories of 2021 that do just that.
Source: Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Cookbook Stories of 2021 – Gastro Obscura
