The RBML holds the papers of Helen Witty, a noted food writer and cookbook author. This piece from the online journal, The Recipes Project, highlights one of Witty’s unpublished projects…

RECIPE FOR AN UNFINISHED BOOK: HELEN WITTY’s AMERICA PRESERVED

Yield: One comprehensive book on sweet preserving, “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first).”

Prep time: At least twelve years (1974–1986), possibly longer.

Status: Unsealed.

Ingredients

• 1 typed proposal to Sally Kovalchick at Workman Publishing, dated September 30, 1986
• 1 working list of raw ingredients, “far from complete,” with more than 200 entries
• 1 food safety testing sheet, annotated in red and black ink
• Clippings, in quantity, from newspapers and magazines
• Recipes borrowed, adapted, and attributed from sources spanning centuries
• Handwritten marginalia, to taste

Method

Among the working papers of food writer Helen Witty (1921–2023), now held at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, sits a project that never became a book. Witty was a two-time James Beard Award winner, editor at Cuisine and Food & Wine, and author of Better Than Store-Bought (1979) and Fancy Pantry (1986).

Her archive documents a career that ranged from editor and recipe developer to authority on American home cooking at a time when the food-writing world was still a small and largely male professional scene.[i] She called one of those unfinished projects America Preserved, and in a 1986 proposal to her publisher described it as “the book on sweet preserving in America.”[ii]

It was, in other words, an ambitious book. But perhaps one appropriately scaled to its subject, since preserving is as broad and deep a cooking technique as one could imagine. Evidence of deliberate food drying in the Middle East stretches back to roughly 12,000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks packed quince in honey; the Romans cooked the two together to produce the ancestor of marmalade.[iii] For most of human history, salting, smoking, fermenting, and sugaring were not cooking techniques so much as serious strategies for addressing the challenge of food logistics– that is, how not to starve between harvests, through long voyages, or on military campaigns. In much of the world, preserving remains an economic necessity. But in the U.S., and likely for Witty’s audience, preserving had undergone a gradual shift toward the enthusiastic hobbyist or serious foodie looking to capture the flavor notes of a season for the less verdant times of year. As the National Center for Home Food Preservation puts it, we have moved “from ‘preserve because we have to’ to ‘preserve because we like to.’”

 

Read more about Witty’s un-cooked book here: https://recipes.hypotheses.org/27364