Culinary Historians of New York & Cecily Brownstone

I just applied for a grant from the Culinary Historians of New York about a food journalist – whose writing was found in the women’s pages. The proposed research is about Cecily Brownstone, who wrote cookbooks and twice-a-week feature articles on food for the Associated Press for 39 years. From 1947 until she retired in 1986, Brownstone wrote two columns on cuisine and five recipes a week for the A.P., an estimated 14,200 articles. Brownstone amassed a collection of some 8,000 cookbooks, 5,000 food pamphlets and hundreds of letters, which she donated to the Fales Collection at New York University in 2002. The research would establish a place for Brownstone and the value of the food sections in the annals of culinary history. It builds on the work of those who have examined materials like cookbooks to better understand the lives of women who are often left out of other historical accounts.[i]The scholarship bridges the categories of culinary history and food history as explained by Barbara Haber. After all, journalists regularly had a foot in the celebrity culinary world of James Beard and Craig Claiborne and another foot in the world of everyday homemakers and grocery store owners.

---