Helen DeBerri

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Dean, Erin

Area of Concentration

Liberal Arts

Abstract

For this thesis I took recipes from my great-grandmother’s personal collection, as well as recipes from the Herkimer County Home Bureau Cookbook of 1923, and adapted them to a modern setting with the intention of creating a new cookbook. By doing this I hoped to be able to bring a little bit of the past to the present and preserve some of my own family history as well as the history of Herkimer County, New York. After selecting recipes to revise so as to make them more appropriate for a kitchen and cook today, I prepared each recipe until it could be easily duplicated by a reader of a cookbook. Preparing these recipes included cooking each recipe multiple times as well as extensive research into its history and context in the region from which it came. Through this thesis I learned about the culinary history of Herkimer County, with a focus in dairy farming and cheese production. I also learned about my family history with cooking. My major findings show that this project is significant because it gives an overview of an important regional history and sets an example for future endeavors in historical recipe adaptation.

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