The Indicator

The Iowa Szathmary Culinary Arts Series

Edward Kidder (1665?-1739), a renowned pastry chef in eighteenth-century London, was also a very successful teacher of the culinary arts. Kidder's scholars were able to record his recipes in small leatherbound notebooks — most likely in the 1720s and 1730s — that through careful ownership have survived the passage of time. Receipts of Pastry and Cookery, edited by David E. Schoonover, is a facsimile edition which reproduces one such notebook, written in a flowing and confident hand, and provides a typeset transcription of the manuscript, a historical and culinary introduction, an updated menu and recipes for today's chefs, and a glossary which defines Kidder's once-familiar terms. The brief recipes assume a good deal of culinary experience. Since the entrepreneurial Kidder probably dictated this book with his students in mind, surely they would already know how to prepare meats from veal to venison for baking and how hot to make the fire. The notebook contains many recipes for meat "pyes" and pasties with meat, plus recipes for puddings and cakes and meat, poultry, and fish main dishes: First Dishes, Bottome Dishes, Side Dishes, For Ye Midle, Second Course, and Plates. Everyone wishing to delve deeper into culinary history will find this book, the fourth volume in the University of Iowa Press Szathmary Culinary Arts Series, fascinating as an artifact of culture and society. The book is available from the University of Iowa Press.

The University of Iowa Libraries Exhibitions Program

MAKING CRIME PAY

This show will focus on the writers of mystery and detective fiction. Various authors in the genre, past and present, will be featured. Attention will be given to writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had other careers, and to Carol and Edward Gorman and Lynn Hall, Iowa authors. Materials to be used will be drawn from the Libraries' collections. This exhibition will run from June through August 1993.

WOMEN TRAVELERS

The exhibition will explore the experiences and contributions of women travelers in the widest sense of the term: women as explorers, observers, and interpreters of "foreign" territories and cultures. A portion of the exhibition will consist of travel books in the strictest sense: narratives of journeys by women. This section will draw heavily on the Thompson Travel Collection, and will serve to show the richness of that little-known resource in the University Libraries. Other segments will show how women in various fields have served as observers and interpreters of other lands and cultures: as painters and photographers (Leni Riefenstahl, Lee Miller), anthropologists (Margaret Mead), filmmakers (Marguerite Duras), poets and novelists, journalists, etc. Naturally, the notion of the Westerner confronting "exotic" foreign cultures raises some interesting questions of perspective. We hope to suggest the problematics of perspective by including some works by non-Western women confronting and interpreting Western society. The interdisciplinary nature of the topic should appeal to members of the University community connected with programs such as International Studies and Women's Studies. Women Travelers will be on view from September through November 1993.