When I open an old cookbook, one of the first things I look for is a “splash page”—one covered with decades of food splatter. It’s a strong indication that the recipe on that page is a good one, well-loved, and often used. Drops of red sauce on yellowing paper become marginalia, a notation from readers past, and a way to commune with previous generations in the kitchen.

Several years ago, I began collecting and cooking from community cookbooks I found in the bottom of boxes in thrift stores and at estate sales around Los Angeles. At first it was the covers, not the recipes, that caught my eye. Like the hand-drawn rendering on the front of a 1950s cookbook from All People’s Christian Church in South Central. But soon, I was cooking from the books weekly, often Googling the recipe contributors to try to learn more about them. In California Cooking, recipes compiled by the Art Museum Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, I found the name of a dear friend’s recently deceased grandmother—a happy surprise.

I started digitizing these books, and my personal collection grew into the Community Cookbook Archive: LA, which now houses over 400 recipe books from Los Angeles clubs, collectives, and organizations. These self-published books weren’t from famous chefs or instructors but instead shared how non-professionals cooked at home. While many of them are not in libraries or other institutional holdings, they were preserved on home bookshelves, passed between generations, and now serve as amazing records of Los Angeles culture.

The term “community cookbook” conjures images of volumes spiral-bound in the 1970s, filled with instructions for Jell-O molds and tuna casseroles. But collective recipe books are a far older phenomenon, dating back long before coil binding was even invented. The books in the Community Cookbook Archive span three centuries of Los Angeles. Indeed, as soon as there was hardcover book printing in this city, there were community cookbooks. Early community cookbooks were typically sold as a creative fundraising tool for women’s clubs and church auxiliaries who did not have access to more traditional modes of funding. However, by the mid-20th century, all sorts of groups were compiling recipes—a bridge club in Inglewood, a bowling league in Long Beach, docents at the Natural History Museum, and the Universal City cast and crew of the TV show Murder She Wrote.

The books in the Community Cookbook Archive document Los Angeles stories through the lens of food. Recipes chart neighborhood demographic shifts, technological innovations in the kitchen, and wartime scarcity. Featured ingredients speak to Southern California’s unique food history. In Cooking the Native Way, produced in 2018 by the Chia Cafe Collective, you’ll find recipes utilizing acorn flour from native oaks, amongst many other Indigenous food sources. Southern California’s Spanish Mission-driven colonization of land and shift to agriculture is also evident, especially in the abundance of citrus recipes. The Pomona Centennial Cookbook from 1987 includes a recipe for “Hollywood Parade” punch, calling for one-quart orange juice and one-quart orange sherbert. Ahead of the recipe, the contributor, Marjorie Souther, writes, “My grandma Woodard moved to Pomona in 1923. She packed oranges all her life. This drink was served under the shade trees in the summertime before the days of air conditioning.”

It’s not uncommon for the books to take on a scrapbook quality with maps or custom artwork, such as the hand-stamped cover design of Comidas Mexicanas from 1937, a bilingual cookbook with recipes from women living in Pasadena’s Mexican communities. Many cookbooks also contain yearbook-style photographs of club members, places of worship, and images of significant Los Angeles architecture. A photo of the Philanthropy and Civics Club on S. Wilton Place—the former home of real estate developer and Crenshaw Boulevard namesake George Crenshaw—is featured in the opening pages of the club’s 1933 cookbook. The recipe collection preserves this since-demolished home’s grand facade, making it an unexpected vehicle for civic memory.

Often passed between individuals as gifts, community cookbooks also became trojan horses for personal histories. How We Cook in Los Angeles, published by the Ladies’ Social Circle of Simpson M.E. Church in 1894, features first-person essays amongst recipes for dishes like walnut cake and cucumber pickles. Almost a century later, The Maryknoll Cookbook, published in 1983 by downtown L.A.’s Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center, also offers recipes for walnut cake and cucumber pickles. Yet this book, too, also gives us a window into Angelenos’ lives. It opens with a dedication to and profile of Sister Mary Bernadette Yoshimochi, who was born in Shiga, Japan, at the turn of the 20th century. Sister Bernadette became a nun in 1928, arriving in California a few years later, where she helped care for Japanese tuberculous patients at Maryknoll Sanitorium in Monrovia. The U.S. government incarcerated her in Manzanar during World War II, and afterward, she joined Maryknoll in Los Angeles.

I consider many community cookbooks to be subversive narratives, through stories like Sister Bernadette’s. They offer information that undermines or supplements the dominant, contemporaneous history of Los Angeles. In community cookbooks, local names appear in print that may not have been published anywhere else—even in phone books, which frequently only listed a household’s men, or in census data, due to systemic undercounting of certain demographics. A community cookbook’s list of contributors is, then, an alternative record of who lived, worked, cooked, and ate here.

Beyond being primary source documents, community cookbooks are instruction manuals meant to be used in the here and now. Their “splash pages” are a testament to the volumes’ original utility. There’s something powerful about sitting down to a meal shared with someone who is no longer here. This is true whether you’re making suffragist and poet Eva Carter Buckner’s cheese straws, from the Federation Cook Book, published in Pasadena in 1910, or Anne Brunell’s “Pleasure Dome” liverwurst and cheese appetizer from UCLA Engineering’s Enjoy! Cookbook, undated, but likely from the late 1960s. Every time I cook from these books, I learn something new about Southern California—and see food as both a way of commemorating the past and an avenue for gathering together in the present.

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In the work, titled I, Moryck, a graduate of the predominantly white women’s college Wellesley, writes that though she has suffered from racial discrimination, she finds “honey as well as hemlock in the cup of every Negro, sunlight as well as shadow.”

The piece conveys a profound sense of mission—even a calling—to help others: “But as a woman, what did I learn? … Work, play, and that highest opportunity, the opportunity to help and give, to mother and to heal,—are mine… I am a Negro—yes—but I am also a woman.”

The 1920s ushered in an extraordinary international representation of Black artistry and intellectualism in the United States. Called the “New Negro Movement” or the “Harlem Renaissance,” this artistic movement by African Americans from the United States and West Indies heralded an African American intellectual output and demand for representation that the world had supposedly never seen.

However, the term “New Negro” was misleading. African American cultural production had debuted with force in the 19th century when some of the most significant Black newspapers, poetry, and narratives that critiqued slavery were written.

Likewise, Moryck’s writings grew upon a long legacy of Black intellectualism and activism in her home city of Newark. A close examination of more than 100 years of archival records reveals clear examples of how Newark’s mid-19th-century Black abolitionism and Black women’s claims for justice were the foundation of the “New Negro” and the much later “Black Arts Movement.”

Wellesley College Portrait of Brenda Moryck. Courtesy of Wellesley College.

Newark’s significance looms due to its involvement in all of the major movements for abolition and activism of the period. It was a place where free and enslaved Black long-term residents and new migrants built some of the earliest African American churches, engaged in significant dialogues about emancipation, and led activist organizing, including forming societies and writing petitions about abolition and suffrage in the years before the Civil War. There, the Black activist community used its wealth, energy, and power to expand the dialogue about abolition and suffrage within the community and also assist with basic livelihood issues.

From the historical record, largely written by men, it’s possible to find brief glimpses of what life was like for Newark’s Black women.

For example, in 1804, an indirect note about the value of education appears when the Newark Female Charitable Society committee decided that “Mrs. Thibou was directed to pay Mrs Browns account of schooling Sarah a black womans children.”

Or in 1805, a newspaper article tells the story of a murdered Black woman named Polly, whose murderer, her husband, was hung in Newark’s Military Park. When Polly refused to reunite with her husband after he had her beaten with a stick, he tried to poison her two times and succeeded on the third.

By tracing the archive in this way, the early ways women worked to help each other becomes apparent. A church deposition documents the story of one African American woman offering to purchase the freedom of another. The woman, Jenny, offered to pay 50 pounds for Flora within a year. She received a handwritten note from Flora’s white owner, but Jenny could not read, and her employer informed her that the note for Flora was not a bill of sale. This deposition gives us insight into how Black women purchased freedom for themselves and others, even as some faced challenges like illiteracy and limited income.

The challenges that Polly and Flora would face, and the work that women like Jenny would do to help them, would essentially model much of the work that Black women progressive reformers, writers, and activists would do to liberate themselves artistically, socially, and economically after the Civil War.

Part of the reason it is hard to find Black women in the historical record is because early African American formal institutions in the city were male-centered. In 1818, Newark’s “African Society” allowed women and the enslaved to be members. However, they clearly stated that “None but male members may vote nor any under the age of 16 years.’”

But women’s work and importance within abolitionist organizations in the city ultimately forced public comment. By May of 1834, the “Constitution of the Colored Anti-Slavery Society of Newark” explicitly decreed that “any person” could qualify for membership. The “First August March” in Newark, celebrating emancipation in the West Indies in 1838 and 1839, indicated that the entire community took part, though all the scheduled speakers were male. By the time the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, renowned African American poet and Newark clergyman Elymas Payson felt it necessary to detail women’s influence and bravery when he wrote:

But whence that voice, so soft, so clear,
So musical within my ear?
It says “We’ll every power defy
Beneath which helpless women sigh,
And seek to mitigate their grief,
And toil and pray for their relief.
We will for fugitives provide,
We will the trembling outcast hide:
This will we do while we have breath,
Fearless of prisons, chains, or death.”
This voice is from the female band
Who are united heart and hand
With all the truly good and brave,
To aid the poor absconding slave.

Through the 19th century, Black women in Newark continued to take on more formal and public roles in civic life. Archival documents reflect how they worked expressly to reach the most vulnerable women and children and cultivate the minds of the privileged around political and artistic issues.

In June 1833, for instance, Christopher Rush, who helped found the first Black church in Newark, contributed to the formation of the Phoenix Society in Manhattan. The goals of this organization included Dorcas Societies—groups formed by women to collect books for circulating libraries and clothing for the poor.

This long legacy of women’s activism in Newark led directly to Brenda Ray Moryck’s 1927 manifesto. By the time Rose Moryck, Brenda Ray’s mother, was born in 1860 to prominent Newark abolitionist parents, the roles available for women leaders in Newark were transformative. In 1872, a female student integrated Newark schools. Prominent women began taking on the roles of teachers, including Harriet Brown, the daughter of Newark’s Underground Railroad leader, and Grace Baxter Fenderson, daughter of Newark’s first African American principal James Baxter. Fenderson went on to found Newark’s chapter of the NAACP in 1915. Rose Moryck would follow in their footsteps to become one of Newark’s early African American teachers.

This combination of empowering Black women with reform power and encouraging the circulation of books and “mental feasts”—meetings for intellectual cultivation and improvement—set the stage for organizations like the Phillis Wheatley Society and Sunday lyceums, all discussion groups that were organized in the 1910s by Black women in Newark. Rose Moryck, one of Newark’s African American teachers, was a prominent speaker at these gatherings, which included lectures on Black history.

Surely, women like Rose Moryck reflected the beliefs and practices of even white and immigrant women during that progressive era of reforms between 1890 and 1920. Women reformers regarded their agitation and social reform as extensions of their natural roles as mothers. But that work became more strikingly political among the women of Newark.

The journal Ebony and Topaz. Courtesy of Public Domain.

By 1922, Newark was hosting the national meeting of the N.A.A.C.P., while Grace Fenderson organized a parade to support the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill that was then in Congress. Prominent women’s groups marched, and groups of men and women carried signs reading “The Failure of the Anti-Lynching Bill Would Officially Condone Mob Murder.” A group of boys carried a banner that said “We are Fifteen Years Old. A Boy of Our Age Was Roasted Alive recently.”

This Newark community, a bridge between the abolitionist and reconstructionist past with a modern Black sensibility, prepared Brenda Ray Moryck to join the “New Negro” movement. After graduating from Wellesley, Moryck went on to write, organize, and teach in Newark, Brooklyn, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. She was an in-demand speaker, theater critic, and fundraiser, and, because of her family’s standing, a Black socialite. She worked with W.E.B. Dubois and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP, published in Opportunity, and The Crisis, and also produced plays with the Harlem Experimental Theater and wrote theater criticism. Her peers viewed their artistic and activist work not as competing callings, but as complementary—using literature and art to facilitate social change.

Moryck’s first marriage was to a schoolteacher, an African American graduate of Harvard who died a year after their marriage. Her second marriage, 13 years later, was to a Black lawyer born in Haiti who she claimed graduated from the Sorbonne. She would move from Newark to Washington, D.C., and back to Manhattan.

While Moryck was very much a part of the Black elite, she was both enamored with and critical of the privileges and limitations of her caste. Her essay defending the Black elite of Washington D.C. against Langston Hughes’s denunciations of them in an August 1927 issue of Opportunity magazine as “pompous” and “pouter-pigeons” and the youth as “moving away from the race” is often cited in debates about the Black elite in the 1920s.

Her fiction explores the internal and external prisons of the elite. In I, Moyrck writes that her family’s economic and class privilege allowed her to not connect her Blackness to inferiority or caste until her adolescence. And in the short story Days, she writes of a middle-class African American couple being harassed and discriminated against by the working-class whites in her building. The wife, who seems to be modeled after Moryck, is shocked by their racism. Her character orders custom wallpaper, plays the piano, and even gets picked up by a famous Black entertainer in a car for dinner—fueling the class envy and bigotry of her white neighbors.

For the most part, Moryck was not ashamed of her middle-class upbringing and her commitment to aesthetics and beauty—rather it empowered her. As a teacher at both the Douglas High School in D.C. and Bordentown, she would lead the theater club and write letters about discrimination to visitors of the Black veterans in the soldier’s hospital. Being a member of the esteemed New York Committee of 100 (women) led her to highlight “disenfranchisement of the Negro in the South.”

Though she was comfortably middle-class and married by the 1940s, surely economic insecurity haunted her. In her 1941 biographical update for her biography at Wellesley College, she explains why she appeared to publish little under her own name. In the questionnaire, she wrote her “present position as “Writer,” adding: “because of prejudice, facts must remain knowledge of firm, by their request, as they claim many Caucasians would boycott magazines if they knew the author of some of their favorite stories was colored, since stories are not about Negroes! Since money rather than fame is my unworthy goal, I don’t mind loss of public acclaim.”

Moryck died in 1945, and she was buried in Newark in the same plot as her mother and father.

Today, Newark remains home to generations of Black women artists and organizers, who carry on the city’s long tradition of art, freedom, and justice.

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Archival photos reproduced in Stephen Halliday’s An Underground Guide to Sewers give us a rare view of these sewers of the past, as they looked to the people who engineered, built, and maintained them.

Most of these photographs—dating from the 1880s to the 1940s—show new construction; the before without the after. Pristine iron bars free of rust, walls too freshly mortared to settle and crack, cement yet unstained by water and waste. Older photos show brick-lined culverts, each brick having been laid by hand.

These images are evocative, sometimes beautiful, appearing like black-and-white outtakes from a forgotten film noir. Storm drains appear as volumes of space, empty by design most of the time. Circular and oval tunnels lead from crawlspaces to caverns beneath reinforcing arches. Concrete corridors and junctions, absent any signage, make one wonder what would have happened if Robert Frost’s traveler had gone underground.

But there’s more to these spaces than their cosmetic wonder. These are, after all, not only sites for the flow of waste; they were also places of work. The men photographed in Victorian coats or Depression-era caps and vests do more than provide scale: they remind us that every sewer tunnel started as a noisy construction site. Imagine the human and mechanical din as rocks were carted or bulldozed away, dozens of workers wrangling stone and earth to fit engineers’ specifications.

Sewers were—and continue to be—the great enabler. As industrialization drew people to the city, those people, in turn, made new demands on water and waste systems. That’s why most of the projects pictured here were at capacity soon after completion. Perhaps that knowledge also imbues these photos with a sense of optimism; designed to solve problems, the sewers continued to work, unobtrusively, from their hiding place, to meet ever larger demands.

With this collection, we get to appreciate today what most people didn’t get to see then. It’s a privileged look at the triumphs of industrial-era infrastructure, but it’s also only one chapter of the narrative. What is left to the imagination is how these underground spaces have since been transformed: the aging materials replaced, the time that’s elapsed, overwriting the glory of a feat of engineering.

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Women are notoriously hard to find in American archives. Their names keep getting folded under. You have to trace fathers and husbands to triangulate an identity. Names float down the generations on rafts of privilege: whiteness helps, as does wealth, and maleness makes everything simpler. A George Washington is a George Washington eternal. (His wife Martha was a Dandridge, then a Custis, then a Washington.) I am white, and my mother’s ancestors were of the class that kept others in bondage. Even with all their record-keeping, I can see only eight generations down the female line: Elise, Elise, Elise, Ellen, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Mary, Ann, and then a woman identified as “Unknown.” Unknown couldn’t legally own property, and had nothing to pass down except the intangibles of her voice, her scent, whatever knowledge she possessed, and, perhaps, her first name. Maybe she was named Ann too.

Though trained as a historian, I am now a novelist, a sequence of careers that anyone who knew me years ago could have predicted. The fictions I wrote as a youth were nearly suffocated with names. I was a budding genealogist, a self-historian, and was entranced by naming—that defining impulse that led me also to fill my mother’s grade books with made-up students. But naming is nurturing too; I wanted to rope my characters into a web of relation. When I was 12 or 13, I learned about Lydia, an ancestor on a different branch of the family who would have been about my age during the Revolutionary War. The story I started writing about her got sidetracked by a detailed map I made of her 45 cousins, but what narrative I spun was marked by my obsessions:

Father used to call me Lyd-John. It was a little joke of ours—I was the boy born with a silly girl’s name. I never used to consider myself bound by all the rules of maidenhood; the etiquette, the dress, the eating habits (Father says I eat like a horse), but as I grow up and across and sideways, I find myself uncomfortably slipping into propriety. I fear I’ve been around Mother too much.

Perhaps my fear was invisibility: not being remarked, recorded, remembered. Another of my early American grandmothers was named Desire—who could forget that? One of her grandmothers shows up on our family tree as Wife #1. Beyond that, unknowns.

As women took the names of their men, so too were many enslaved people stuck with the names of those who claimed to own them. In writing my history book, I learned of a Southern family that had maintained better records than my own. The white Jerdones of Louisa County, Virginia, kept an “age book” documenting the births and deaths of the black Jerdones—it ended in April 1865, though white Jerdones as late as the 1930s remembered “negroes coming to us to learn ‘how old I is, please!’” Each newborn was listed with a name, birth date, and the name of the child’s mother. No fathers at all, because the state of enslavement, since the Virginia Slave Law of 1662, was dependent on the condition of the mother. White men could gift their names to white descendants, erasing the heritable influence of white women, and simultaneously—conveniently—absent themselves from black lineages, converting their own forced offspring into property. But from the Jerdones’ list we can pry African-American families: Beck, for instance, who in 1768 had Nanny, who in 1784 had Violet, who in 1800 had Chloe. Does Chloe have descendants today who don’t know they belong to her?

The author’s great-grandmother. Photo courtesy of Katy Simpson Smith.

As the names of black babies were being recorded by a white hand, a white Jerdone (Sarah) was taken from home by her husband. Her letters to her mother (also Sarah) are one-note: “I cant help regretting that I could not spend a few more days with my ever Dear Mother before I left you Dearst and best of Mothers. Of all the tryalls that ever Crossed me that of parting from my Dear mother has been the hardest.” When the elder Sarah died in 1818, the 37 enslaved people she counted as her personal property were sold, at least five of them mothers with young children. Thirty-seven bodies amounted to $18,535 (about $350,000 today), money which went—where? To Sarah’s one surviving son, most likely: Francis, named after his father.

But white Sarah had named her daughter Sarah, who named her daughter Sarah. And on the plantation simultaneously was a black Sarah, whose daughter Moll named her first daughter Sarah; Beck’s daughter Tamar named her first daughter Beck; Dorcas’s daughter Phebe named her first daughter Dorcas. My white great-grandmother Elise named her daughter Elise, who named her daughter Elise. There is a holding onto identity—to slim power—here.

How do you search for a woman in the archives if her name is only Sarah? For many African Americans—whose racial identity was determined by legal status, whose legal status derived from the mother—genealogies break off mid-tree. Even in white lineages, women dangle tenuously, like leaves. How to find a simple “Sarah” in America? Sarah who raised you, who washed you, who maybe taught you letters, and how to hide, and what parts of religion to trust? To hunt for our mothers’ names in the past is to pull back the heavy curtains of property—both being propertied and being property. Names denote possession. I’m a descendant of the South Carolina Clinkscales. So too is Jimmy Carter; so too is a black woman who checked me in at a conference several years ago. I recently saw a Clinkscales pop up in the credits of I, Tonya, and I later looked him up: a young black man from Georgia. We might be kin; we might just share a white man’s name.

Naming alone doesn’t create history, as I learned in my early attempts at historical fiction. Stories can live on without names, though they’re harder to find, harder to push to the front of others’ imaginations. So I call out the dead Sarahs when I find them, I ask the living Elises for their memories. I clutch my ancestors’ objects, which I know I’m lucky to claim. I have my great-great-great-grandmother’s fork, my great-great-grandmother’s ring, my great-grandmother’s sewing table, my grandmother’s small pink compact, the powder within still smelling strongly of her. A fork, a ring, a table, a mirror. This is the moral of naming, that what has a label is remembered. If we in turn label the unknowns, will the ghosts of our mothers begin to rise?

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