AUGUST 18 • 2022 | 69
O
ne of the foremost
authorities on the
history of American
cooking, Janice Bluestein
Longone, died Aug. 3, 2022, at
the age of 89. Her passion for
collecting early cookbooks and
her enthusiasm for sharing her
knowledge anticipated the rise
of culinary history. She became
an essential resource for cook-
book publishers, for restauran-
teurs and academic historians.
Janice Bluestein, middle
child of a Jewish family in
Dorchester, Mass., recalled
that she grew up on traditional
Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine, cab-
bage rolls and gefilte fish. Her
father sold kitchen equipment.
Janice graduated as a history
major from Bridgewater State
Teacher’s College in 1954.
After her graduation, she
married Daniel Longone, her
sweetheart since they had met
as teenagers. They continued
their education at Cornell,
where she studied Chinese
history and Dan completed his
Ph.D. in organic chemistry.
An early present from Dan
to Jan, the first edition of newly
published Gourmet magazine,
inspired the couple to sub-
scribe, stretching their tight
graduate-student budget. Jan
counted that magazine as one
of the formative influences on
her career.
The couple moved to Ann
Arbor in 1959, when Dan
joined the chemistry faculty
at U-M.
She learned about interna-
tional cooking from students
who came from around
the world. When these stu-
dents asked her for “typical
American meals,” she took that
as an intellectual challenge. She
began a quest for the sources of
American food traditions, col-
lecting early American recipes
and cookbooks.
She told Steve Friess of
Tablet magazine, “I started
looking for and finding and
then collecting books, and
unbeknownst to me, I must
have decided I was going to
open an antiquarian cookbook
shop because I had been buy-
ing every book I could find in
rare book shops, but I’d buy
four copies.”
And in 1972, she did open
a mail-order business, “The
Wine and Food Library,” sell-
ing out-of-print cookbooks
from her basement. Word
spread quickly. According
to Pat Cornett, a friend and
colleague of Jan Longone’s:
“Through her work at her
bookshop, she came to know
everyone in the culinary and
cooking communities.”
The customers of her busi-
ness were impressed by her
encyclopedic knowledge,
and so, according to Cornett,
“restauranteurs, cookbook
writers and academic histo-
rians relied on her for infor-
mation, especially about early
American cooking.”
She collected early cook-
books, including ephemera
such as menus, diaries, food
advertisements and cookbooks
published to support charitable
projects of religious and com-
munity groups. These obscure
charitable cookbooks would
typically disappear shortly
after publication and get lost
to history. Longone collected
them as invaluable sources for
recipes, but also as examples of
women’s activism. Longone’s
collection of cookbooks pro-
duced by temperance workers,
church groups and synagogue
sisterhoods anticipated and
helped build a change of focus
in the study of history: histo-
rians focused on domestic life
of ordinary men and especially
women.
Her collections include the
first known cookbook pub-
lished in the United States
in 1796, and the first known
cookbook written by a Black
woman, published in 1866. Jan
Longone had a special interest
in cookbooks produced by
Jewish institutions, including
examples from every state. She
noted the regional differences
between Jewish cookbooks
about the kosher laws. In
some regions, recipes include
shellfish, but not pork; others
include pork; and some do not
include mention of anything
Jewish.
In these obscure charity
cookbooks, Longone could
see how American eating
changed in ways that modern
Americans can barely fathom.
Imagine:
• Buying groceries before
stores sold food in standard
packages.
• Buying groceries before
there were national brands.
• Cooking before your home
had a continuous supply of
fuel.
• Processing leftovers before
you could count on regular
deliveries from the iceman.
• Unsubscribing from your
iceman when you got your first
refrigerator.
In Ann Arbor, Jan volun-
teered at libraries in the Ann
Arbor area while she founded
organizations for the study
of cooking. Eventually, Jan
Longone became Curator of
American Culinary History
at Special Collections of
the Hatcher Library at the
University of Michigan.
The couple began, in 2000,
donating their extensive col-
lection of culinary publications
to the University of Michigan,
where the Janice Bluestein
Longone Culinary Archive
now contains more than 30,000
items.
She co-founded the Culinary
Historians of Ann Arbor in
1983 and served as its first chair
for several years. Since then, she
retained the title of honorary
president. She was a found-
ing member of the American
Institute of Wine & Food.
Pat Cornett recalls that after
Dan retired in 1988, “the cou-
ple would travel the country
haunting used bookstores.
”
Dan sought especially books
about wine, and she about food.
Cornett observes that “they
remained sweethearts as long as
she lived. I never met a couple
who were closer — intellectu-
ally and emotionally — than
they.”
An Authority on
American Culinary
History Dies at 89
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Janice Bluestein Longone