Another page from Sarasota's past

When I first wrote about "Let's Cook With Sarasota Celebrities," the Junior Welfare League's 1962 cookbook, I had no idea that I would hear from so many folks with so much to add. I hope you have enjoyed their comments and memories as much as I have.

Dorothy Conlon (author of "At Home in the World," a travel memoir) referred me to a wonderful article in the Christian Science Monitor by Marilyn Gardner about the history of cookbooks for charity.

It talks about how they began with women banding together to help other women, and in so doing, help themselves. An antiquarian book dealer and curator of American culinary history for the University of Michigan's Clements Library, Janice Longone, points out that these books "preserve America's culinary heritage by region," offering a social history from the Civil War forward. Those women, left alone during the war, collaborated while honing valuable business skills such as hiring printers, testing recipes, selling ads and working on a distribution system. And although there was always opposition to women organizing, these projects probably skated under the radar because as Logone points out, "men probably thought, 'it's only a cookbook.'"

Boy, has that changed. I have never figured the percentages, but the number of men who regularly read and respond to this column is significant and growing. I am never surprised to hear a male voice when I answer the phone. Even in 1962, the men who contributed to "Let's Cook" numbered 38. Women numbered 10. Couples, 2.

The Christian Science Monitor article is excellent, and I hope you will go to http://tiny url.com/6n3gsa to read it. It will give you a whole new perspective on community cookbooks the next time you see a copy of the Sarasota Junior League's "Simply Sarasota." Far from the inexpensive paper and binding of the first charity cookbooks, "Simply Sarasota" is slick and downright "uptown."

And even though it may make assembling a cookbook look easy, no less care and effort goes into the newer books than went into the first known cookbook for a good cause, "A Poetical Cook-Book" from 1864.

By now you must be wondering about the huge photo sharing this page.

Sue Bissell, the first president of what used to be called the Sarasota Junior Welfare League, visited me recently, bringing in the full page from the Sept. 16, 1962, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, all about the "coming out" of "Let's Cook With Sarasota Celebrities." Bissell was president long before the book was published but had saved and savored the page on which are pictured Irene Layne and MacKinlay Kantor, Ben Stahl, Al Buell, John D. MacDonald, Thornton Utz, Helen Frank Protas and Emmett Kelly.

Also pictured are the cookbook committee, Mrs. Latimer Turner, Mrs. Eugene Gruhler and Mrs. Milton C. Hess. The editor of the section was Florence Swift Schneider, later the society editor for the Sarasota Journal. Joseph Steinmetz contributed celebrity photos, and others were taken by Ken Torrington, who also later worked for the Journal.