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Jennifer Cognard-Black, professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with the Women, Gender and Sexuality program, has published an article, "Teaching Grandma Peg's Recipes," about incorporating one of her own personal recipe collections into her pedagogical approaches to teaching the literatures of food and food writing. Professor Cognard-Black's article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of The Recipes Project: Art, Food, Magic, Science, Medicine; this issue, edited by Jolie Braun and Jessica P. Clark, is themed on "Modern Personal Recipe Collections." Professor Cognard-Black has taught food-based classes at St. Mary's College for over twenty years, including "Books that Cook" (a class designed around novels, memoirs, and films with recipes in which students literally cook from the books); "Just Food: Food Writing for Social Justice" (a service-learning course dedicated to studying and writing about food inequality, while also engaging in class service projects); and "Food Writing: A Tasting Plate" (an upper-level creative writing workshop where students write taste poems, food fictions, and edible essays while also producing all-class writing projects, which have included "The Kate Farm Cookbook" and a podcast series called "Tilling Tales: Stories of the Kate Farm." For Professor Cognard-Black, handwritten recipes are more than archival documents, for they contain individual and collective memories while also revealing the familial, ethnic, religious, economic, and agricultural traditions of the people who record and use them. She also appreciates how recipes are an inherently collaborative endeavor as well as a series of food stories that can become a literal part of any reader when that reader cooks, shares and eats them.
