Moosewood Cookbook

The Moosewood Cookbook is a hand-lettered and hand-illustrated cookbook by Mollie Katzen and published in 1977 by Ten Speed Press (Berkeley, California). It features recipes used and developed at the Moosewood Restaurant- a collectively owned and worker-managed restaurant and community project started in 1972 in Ithaca, New York. The recipes collected in the Moosewood Cookbook came from the personal histories and culinary heritages of the 37 individuals who are credited as contributors to the book. 

This book's text - recipes, shopping lists, table of contents, appendix, etc- is entirely hand-lettered. Even the ISBN written out by hand. Each page is lovingly adorned with whimsical yet pertinent illustrations, giving each recipe its own mood and story. The book, which was originally self-published in 1974 by Katzen, stands as a salient time capsule of the era in which it was created. It holds significance as representation of grassroots publishing of the 1970s. Its hand done quality is a celebration of the do-it-yourself spirit of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, and serves as a punctuation in a larger movement of graphic design that championed the warmth, authenticity and honesty of the human hand.

Sources:

Bromwich, Kathryn. “Covering the Counterculture: The 60s Underground Press – in Pictures.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/gallery/2017/sep/23/covering-the-counterculture-the-60s-underground-press-in-pictures.

Kaplan, Geoff. Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964-1974. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Leonore Fleischer; Leonore Fleischer covers the New York publishing scene for Book World. “Decade of the Big Deal: Publishing in the ’70s.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 30 Dec. 1979, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1979/12/30/decade-of-the-big-deal-publishing-in-the-70s/04f86b0f-aac7-4135-9c43-f632b812d171/.

Reed, John. “The Underground Press and Its Extraordinary Moment in US History.” Hyperallergic, 27 July 2016, hyperallergic.com/313889/the-underground-press-and-its-extraordinary-moment-in-us-history/.

Wilhelm, Menaka. “The Far out History of How Hippie Food Spread across America.” NPR, NPR, 23 Jan. 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/23/579186110/the-far-out-history-of-how-hippie-food-spread-across-america.

Caption text by: Lindsey Walker