Online Lecture: Cooking by the Book

The New Castle Historical Society is hosting the first in its series of online lectures as part of the Food for Thought: A Tasty Exploration of Food, History, Culture and Community program on Wednesday, October 21 at 7:00 pm. “Cooking by the Book: Celebrity Chefs, Cookbookery, and the Changing Landscape of American Cuisine” will be presented by Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson and will bring participants on a journey through America’s cuisine as told by cookbooks. Along the way we’ll meet celebrity chefs obscure and familiar from all over the country and across the decades. Spanning the late 18th century to the present, Wassberg Johnson discusses how cookbooks reflected and influenced changes in home cooking in the United States. The lecture will be via Zoom, registration information can be found at https://www.newcastlehs.org/events/.

Sarah Wassberg Johnson is The Food Historian – author, speaker, educator, podcaster, and blogger on all things related to food history. A frequent interviewee of journalists looking for historical context, she was featured in all three episodes of The History Channel mini-series, “The Food That Built America” and has been featured on NPR, the Atlantic, CNN, Atlas Obscura, and more. She has published in New York History journal and the Agricultural History journal and is currently finalizing edits on her book, “Preserve or Perish: Food in New York State during the Great War, 1916-1919,” under contract with SUNY Press.