Welcome!
The Ann Arbor Culinary School is an archive dedicated to collecting historical recipes of Ann Arbor, Michigan for teaching and learning purposes.
Archival Practices
An archive may contain a wealth of information, but that wealth is only as good as it is accessible. We aspired to create an online archive that was not only a robust source of historical culinary information, but also pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate. For some users, this archive will be the first they ever interact with, and it was important to keep this in mind when constructing the layout, presentation, and navigation features. Further, for accessibility issues all recipes have been transcribed.
Record Selection
Recipes in this archive originated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ranging from 1899 to 2017. We chose recipes that reflected their contemporary temporal and spatial contexts--those that show how life in Ann Arbor was at the time of their publishing. They also contain a variety of ingredients - this archive contains recipes appropriate for diverse diatary restrictions.
Copyright and Fair Use
Recipes cannot be copyrighted; furthermore, their use in our archive falls under fair use policy — these recipes are meant to be utilized for teaching and learning. This can be a contentious policy, though. Check out this New York Times article about the controversies surrounding copyrights and plagiarism in the cookbook world.
Target User Groups
The primary users of our archive are high school history students. With this in mind, we wanted the archive to be intuitive to use and easy to view, as well as make the material engaging. This, we hope, will promote interest in both the content and archives as an information resource. The secondary users of the archive are educators, namely, but not limited to, high school history teachers. Therefore we have included a lesson plan for ease of incorporating the archive into cirriculum on local and/or culinary history.
While we imagine our target audiences to be local to Ann Arbor and surrounding communities, the archive is for everyone interested in culinary history!
Perspectives
Many of the recipes we found came from religious community compilations, such as churches and synogogues. Additionally, there is notable presence of local institutions, featuring restaurants (such as Zingerman's) and the University of Michigan, both of which present their own culinary perspectives. There is great dietary diversity in the collected recipes, including vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, lactose-free, and gluten-free options.
However, voices that are absent from the records are recipes of non-published home cooks, menus of non-restaurant and/or secular institutions, and, potentially, culinary records from communities of color. Thus, though we strive for accuracy with what records are in the archive, it is not a complete picture of historical Ann Arbor life and culture.
Engagement
If you make one of the recipes you've found in the archive, or would like to submit any recipes you have that originated in Ann Arbor, kindly consider emailing us a picture of your record (be it a finished dish or a recipe) to aglclark@umich.edu so it can be added to the site! Additionally, please feel free to email for the answer key to the lesson plan.