A Prattle on Three Cookbooks. Or Is It Two?

The Kentucky Housewife. A Collection of Recipes for Cooking by Mrs. Peter A. White, Chicago & New York, Belford Clarke & Co., c1885.

The Blue Grass Cook Book. A Manual of Useful Information for Housewives by Genvieve Long, Chicago, W. B. Conkey Company, c1903.

The Blue Grass Cook Book compiled by Minnie [Minerva] C. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, c1904.

It took me a long time to find The Kentucky Housewife by Mrs. Peter A. White c1885. When it arrived a few weeks ago, it sure seemed v e r y familiar. As if, maybe, I already owned this book? Drat! I paid a handsome price for the pleasure of capturing an elusive title. So when I looked through my shelf of Kentucky cookery books, I placed my hands on The Blue Grass Cook Book by Genvieve Long c1903. Well, the resemblance is more than passing. They are the same book! Different titles, different authors, different publishers, ever so slightly different cloth covers. And, the text block is identical, but the index of Blue Grass appears at the beginning of the book, and is at the end in Kentucky Housewife. I just noticed that the header of each page in Long's book says The Kentucky Housewife!

I forgot how much research I did several years ago trying to track down bibliographic information on the Blue Grass volume and Genvieve Long. Then it came to me!

There is a much more famous The Blue Grass Cook Book by Minnie C. Fox c1904. Ms. Fox's brother, John Fox, Jr. was a famous Kentucky author at that time who wrote the introductory remarks. Alivin Langdon Coburn, renowned photographer, contributed the 13 black &white photo-illustrations of African-American cooks. It was republished in 1911 and 1918.  The 1904 edition sold yesterday at Swann Galleries in New York for $350. So it has great collectible value as well as importance to social history documenting African American contributions to American culinary literature. Tony Tipton-Martin has a poignant introduction in the 2005 reprint of Minnie Fox's Blue Grass Cook Book by The University Press of Kentucky.

W. B. Conkey Company was a Chicago publishing house, its printing operation based in Hammond, Indiana and on the Internet I found an Advertisement to Booksellers from Conkey dated 31 January 1906 which features The Blue Grass Cook Book they published.

Here is a bit of speculation, I am going to go out on a limb and presume there is no Genvieve Long and that Conkey published this book to take market advantage of the popularity of Minnie Fox's volume. The books were published within one year of each other, each book with the same name. I don't know if they appropriated Mrs. White's book outright, or came to some agreement with the original publisher, Belford Clarke, also a Chicago (and New York) publishing concern.

The publisher must have wanted a Kentucky cookery title in its catalog. No where within the book or in the advertisement or through an Internet search is there any stated attribution, or republishing rights to Mrs. White's original Kentucky Housewife.

There is nothing, in any bibliographic reference, about Conkey's Blue Grass Cook Book. Nor can I locate any information about its supposed author, Genvieve Long. If anyone has information, please contact me.

It certainly isn't unprecedented that publishers boldly plagiarized books. It goes back since the beginning of publishing, but especially true of women's works, which often went unattributed. Women often published anonymously, for in polite society it was part of the social contract of the day, that women's names were not in print, "unless, born, wed or dead." (I don't know who said this but I use it all the time.) The cook book world was ripe for the picking

among unscrupulous publishers, and other authors, for that matter. It happened again and again. Even our first cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons c1796, was filched just a few years after it was published by another New England authoress.

Our situation here is like some kind of double conspiracy, for Conkey to publish Mrs. White's book under a popular new title, which they appropriated from Ms. Fox!

One redeeming quality of the absconded Blue Grass Cook Book is this handwritten recipe for Elderberry Wine, which is misspelled, but certainly inscribed with a fountain pen. It appears on the last page of the book, facing a page of "Praise from the Press" for the phantom author.

Stay tuned. I have other culinary quandaries to discuss over time.