State Could Lose Them : Universities Licking Lips for Recipes

Locked inside a chilly and carefully humidified vault at the UC Santa Barbara library are the valuable leftovers of an academic recipe turned sour.

Those are the 858 cookbooks and manuscripts from the 16th to 19th centuries that form the Andre L. Simon-Eleanor Lowenstein Collection of Gastronomic Literature. Scholars say the collection of mainly French, British and early American works is among the most important of its kind and provides fascinating views through kitchen windows into the societies outside.

The collection was a major ingredient in a plan, backed by some of the biggest names in American cooking, to make UC Santa Barbara a national center of scholarship on cuisine and its history. However, the idea was killed by a faculty revolt and the legal troubles of former UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Robert Huttenback, convicted last month of tax evasion and embezzlement of university funds.

Valued at Up to $1 Million

Now, the American Institute of Wine and Food, their owner, is looking for a new home for the volumes, which include some extremely rare first editions and are thought to be worth as much as $1 million.

That has American academia hungrily smacking its lips in anticipation.

“It’s clear why any institution would want a collection like that. These books are very scarce and don’t come on the market that often,” explained Michael Ryan, curator of special collections at Stanford University. Institute officials said Stanford is among four finalists in contention to receive the books, along with UC Davis, UC San Diego and Harvard University’s Radcliffe College, the apparent front-runner.

The collection, Ryan said, “is a rich source of social history about women, etiquette, customs, all things that are terribly topical today.”

Size of Meals

A look at the subtitle of “The English Housewife,” a 1623 text, shows how life has changed for most women in the industrialized world. Complete with 17th-Century spellings, it reads: “Containing the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate woman, as her skill in physick, surgery, cookery, extraction of oyles, banquetting stuffe, ordering of great feasts, pressing of all sorts of wines, conceited secrets, distillations, perfumes, ordering of wooll, hempe, flax, making cloth and dying: the knowledge of dayries, office of malting of oates, their excellent uses in a family of brewing, baking and all other things belonging to an household.”

A modern reader is struck by the size of proposed meals. Nouvelle portions were not in vogue. For example, the 1783 book “The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant” suggests this menu for an August dinner: a first course of vermicelli soup, pea soup, lambs head, pork grisken, roasted chickens, fricasseed sole, ox palates, and French pie; a second course of roasted pullets, ribs of lamb, sturgeon, artichoke buttons, mushrooms, stewed peas, tartlet, currant pie and cheesecake.

Cookbooks were also sources of home remedies, such as this tip from the 1741 “Family Magazine” to make hair grow: “Take willow leaves seeth’d in oil, and annoint the bald place with the juice.” A 1724 book, “The Juice of the Grape,” claims that wine is “the Grand Preserver of Health and Restorer in Most Diseases.”

And they helped seafarers survive long-distance travel with such recipes as one for ketchup “that will last 20 years,” according to the 1747 “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.” The secret involves a lot of pepper, ginger and stale beer.

But scholars say the books provide deeper, although oblique, insights into nutrition, medicine, economics, technology, farming, climate, trade routes, travel, international relations, urbanization, religious customs and class structure.

“Food as an aspect of civilization has all kinds of unexpected clues for the historically minded scholar,” said Sidney Mintz, an anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University who used cookbooks to research a book on the history of sugar consumption.

Clues to Questions

The books contain clues to such questions as: Was coffee from Arabia common on British tables in the 1700s? Did 19th-Century Parisian women raise their own vegetables or was the city growing too crowded for this? How dependent on slaves was an early 19th-Century Virginia household? When did it become common knowledge that eating citrus fruit prevents scurvy?

Richard Graff, chairman of an American Institute of Wine and Food committee on the books, said a choice of a new home for the collection will be made within a year, likely under a permanent loan arrangement. The institute, he said, will evaluate which library can best restore and protect the books and ensure that they become “a springboard for scholarship and research.”

Despite some sentiment to keep the books in California, many on the committee speculated that the winner will be Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. The Schlesinger already has a collection of 5,000 historical books on food topics and is the best-known center in the nation for such research. It is also the home of the letters of Eleanor Lowenstein, the New York cookbook seller and collector who acquired and added to the collection of the dean of British gourmet writing, Andre L. Simon.

Furthermore, the culinary wing of the Schlesinger is named after Julia Child, the famous cook and author who was influential in the institute’s acquisition of the books in 1981 as well as their move to Santa Barbara in 1984. Child spends winters in Santa Barbara and has another home in Cambridge, Mass., the city where Radcliffe is located.

Robert Power, an institute member and owner of the Nut Tree Restaurant near Davis, thinks UC Davis should receive the books because the school has a well-regarded viticulture program and a large library collection about wine.

‘A Nice Marrying’

“This would make a nice marrying of collections,” said Power, who added that another benefit to the UC Davis proposal is that the Simon-Lowenstein would remain in California. “We don’t like to have to admit that everything has to go back to the academic capital of Harvard,” he said.

However, Dun Gifford, chairman of the institute’s board, said an interesting compromise might be to split up the collection, sending the wine books to UC Davis and the food literature to Radcliffe. “It has a certain consistency if we follow the assumption that the primary value of the books is for scholarship,” said Gifford, a Boston-area investment banker and restaurateur.

Scholars and institute officials all praise the care the books have received at UC Santa Barbara. The books sit in a tight-security vault kept between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit and between 50% and 60% humidity to prevent crumbling and molding, according to archivist Christian Brun, who called the care a matter of “professional courtesy.” The books can be viewed only with permission of the institute, he said.

Antique cookbooks need special protection because they usually were battered in their early years, explained Jacqueline Mallorca, a collector and author in San Francisco. “They got handed down from mother to daughter and tended to be used in the kitchen,” she said. “You are going to pick 18th-Century porridge off the pages.”

Yet despite the compliments to Brun and his staff, there appears no chance that the books will stay put. And with their departure will go the last remnant of a dream of Child, Huttenback and others to move the institute’s headquarters from San Francisco to an empty building on the west side of the campus. That building was to house the books and become the food world’s intellectual center, not for wine and cheese parties, but for serious inquiry into one of humanity’s most basic needs.

“That is no longer possible,” committee chairman Graff said. “Without a friendly person at the top, it just doesn’t seem appropriate to think any further about moving ourselves to Santa Barbara.”

The institute was founded in 1981, and Huttenback, a gourmet and a backer of the group, soon began to lobby for a campus affiliation. But in 1982, the faculty passed a resolution opposing the plan, saying it would drain resources from other scholarship. Some professors feared it would make the school seem frivolous as it was trying to shed its image as “UC Surf.” However, Huttenback persisted, and the books moved to his campus without any firm deal.

“The whole original idea of the institute was that some major university would finally understand that culinary history is a legitimate academic subject. It is so hard to convince academics of this,” said Jan Longone, a rare cookbook dealer in Ann Arbor, Mich., who is an institute member.

‘Terribly Jealous’

Child, speaking from her Cambridge home, said the faculty got “terribly jealous with a new discipline. . . . They don’t want anyone taking their territory.”

What’s more, Child said, the whole proposal would have cost $7 million. “It was a lovely idea,” she said. “But it just wasn’t the right place for it, and where are you going to get $7 million?”

More serious troubles then engulfed Huttenback. He and his wife were accused of using university funds to remodel his house. Huttenback, who resigned as chancellor in July, 1986, insisted that the spending was legal because his house was used so much for entertaining UC donors and for recruiting faculty. Child testified in Huttenback’s defense during the recent trial.

Last month, Huttenback was convicted of embezzlement of more than $100,000 and of five counts of income tax evasion. Freda Huttenback was found guilty of embezzlement. Acquitted of several other charges, they await sentencing.

The new chancellor, Barbara Uehling, said that she would like the books to stay on campus but that the idea of moving the Institute there is dead.

“I don’t see us pursuing the relationship,” she said. “It’s just not a natural fit unless we had an agricultural program or a program on the production of grapes or home economics.”

UC San Diego hopes to get the books with promises that it will host institute seminars twice a year. Mary Walshok, dean of University Extension at UC San Diego, said there will be no faculty opposition because, unlike what happened at Santa Barbara, professors are involved in early planning.

The books have moved a lot in the last 25 years. In 1962, Lowenstein bought the British and French titles from Simon, who died in 1970. Lowenstein added American texts and, after her death in 1980, her husband sold the combined collection for $135,000 to David Segal, an economics professor at Harvard, according to Graff. Segal kept a few books but, at Child’s suggestion, offered the rest to the new institute for the same price he paid. Lila Jaeger of Freemark Abbey and Rutherford Hill Wineries put up the money, and other donors subsequently helped finance the purchase and its move to San Francisco.

First American Cookbook

According to its bibliography, the collection includes an extremely rare first edition of Will Rabisha’s “The Whole Body of Cookery,” a 1661 volume that is considered the progenitor of English cookbooks; 17th-Century works by Hannah Wolley, the first English woman to write a cookbook; Amelia Simmons’ 1808 “American Cookery,” the first American cookbook; and most of the early French classics.

Segal donated his copy of John Evelyn’s “Sylva,” a landmark work about forestry and horticulture made extremely valuable by its handwritten inscription from the author to Lord Carteret, the royal governor of New Jersey.

The books range from the plebeian to the royal. “The American Frugal Housewife” from 1836, offers this pointer: “Look frequently to the grease-pot, and see that nothing is there which might have servied to nourish your own family or a poorer one.”

“The Royal English and Foreign Confectioner,” dated 1862, details such extravagant recipes as an enormous dessert of biscuits, apricot jam and chocolate icing--all carved to resemble a boar’s head.

The cookbook industry is spiced with charges of plagiarism. But according to Mallorca, a review of the collection shows that there are no completely new recipes, only new versions. “Of course, 200 to 300 years ago, they tended to eat things like udder, which would not appeal to the modern palate,” she said. “And if they ate a lot of vegetables, they didn’t talk about it. They talked about meat.”