Recipes as Time Capsules: Learn about your best recipes with Karla Knutson

Join Karla Knutson, Professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, for a combination of research and recipe swapping. Come to this roundtable with your favorite community cookbook recipe (or the whole cookbook!) Karla will discuss how she analyzed the recipes in her grandmother’s Lutheran church cookbook and what they revealed about the culture of the time.

Karla’s academic premise is that community cookbooks reflect and create commensality, the sharing of food with others, in ways unique to the genre of cookbooks. Since the writers are also the audience, these texts differ from other cookbooks with unknown general audiences

She is cooking her way through her grandmother’s 1985 community cookbook published by the women’s group at a Lutheran church in central North Dakota. To learn more about how cookbook’s recipes reflect the lives of the contributors, their Norwegian and German heritage, and twentieth-century food trends in the Upper Midwest, Karla writes about the recipes on her blog and in “Vintage Dishes,” her monthly column in The Fargo Forum. Surrounded by a sea of Jello (and beet!) salads, hotdishes, microwaved mains, and bars, she currently is writing a book about her findings.

Learn about these findings and the analytic process Karla uses. Then, it’s time to share and analyze the recipes you brought.

Come to this roundtable ready to listen, talk, and share.

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