Watch: The U-M Library's Collections Experience

Why Watch This Video?

You’ll gain insight into the diverse range of collections available at the university library, including special collections, and understand how to use primary documents for academic research.
By showcasing specific examples like the Janice Bluestein Langone Culinary Archive, you can see firsthand how historical documents can enrich their understanding of present-day issues.

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Lisa Young (Faculty Member, Department of Anthropology)

My name is Lisa Young and I am a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology.

I've been teaching a first year seminar for the last couple of years. One of the things that I want to do in this class is to get students to think about the changes in our food system from the past, more than 100 years ago. And that's where we go to the Bentley Library, to take a look at the scrapbook collection. And then we come here to special collections to look at cookbooks to think about the ingredients on the dishes that are on the menus. And I have students look at the seasonality of those ingredients.

Juli McLoone (Curator, Special Collections Research Center)

Lisa had initially approached me to help develop a connection between the menus and scrapbooks that the students are researching, and the cookbooks here in the Janice Bluestein Langone Culinary Archive and looking at how these foods actually would have been prepared.

One of the jewels of the Janice Bluestein Langone Culinary Archive is Melinda Russell's 1866 Domestic Cookbook. This cookbook is extremely important. It's the oldest known African-American-authored cookbook and it was published very close by in Paw Paw, Michigan.

Jeremy Moser (Chef de Cuisine)

For the guests tonight we selected baked sweet potato pudding. The first time I made it, it was just like really fluffy and the mouthfeel is just extraordinary. And it just kind of stuck with me and I felt that that would be a great recipe to demonstrate. A lot of her recipes are very simple, simple ingredients. And once you convert the older way of writing recipes into a newer, more familiar way of doing recipes, they turned out really good.

Lisa Young (Faculty Member, Department of Anthropology)

One hundred years ago, a lot of the food was local. And now we think of that as something revolutionary. But we can learn a lot about what was going on in the past with local food and the diversity of small farms that have been supported here in Michigan for a very long time. A class about food could use the Library, it could have a great conversation with Dining, it could incorporate not only learning about the past and helping students learn how to do research with primary documents, but also wrap into contemporary issues that were important to their lives.

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