CfP: Personal Recipe Collections

Send us your pitches for the Spring 2026 issue of the Recipes Project

Dear RP readers,

We are excited to share the CfP for our Spring 2026 issue of The Recipes Project: PERSONAL RECIPE COLLECTIONS, co-edited by Jess Clark and Jolie Braun. We’ll be collecting pitches in the coming weeks, with an anticipated publication date in May 2026. More info on how to contribute below!

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Today we have more recipes available to us than ever before, via websites, social media, print publications, and personal recommendations. This abundance can pose a challenge: how best to collect, organize, and store our recipes? Selecting and preserving recipes from a wide variety of sources, however, is not new. Individuals have used manuscript cookbooks, recipe boxes, scrapbooks, binders, oral traditions, and computers to do this, each method with their own unique set of advantages and disadvantages.

While scholars of medieval and early modern recipes have parsed the differences between personal, institutional, and printed collections, more modern personal collections have often garnered less notice, care, and attention, with scholars gravitating towards printed cookbooks and away from the index cards, scribbled notes, and newspaper clippings which so often constitute a modern personal collection. Yet they are compelling historical artifacts that can provide information about people, places, and cooking and food trends of the past.

A typed recipe for Toll House Cookies, one of thirty-three recipe cards owned and annotated by the poet Sylvia Plath and sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 2021. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.

For the upcoming Spring issue, guest edited by Jolie Braun, the RP team is soliciting proposals for 500-850 word posts related to personal recipe collections featuring original research as well as pieces on museum and archival collections, pedagogy, and public history. We welcome contributions from anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, elders, archivists, curators, activists, artists, art historians, material culture scholars, and those with backgrounds in public history. We value work that engages visual storytelling, so posts should include one or two copyright-cleared images. Please send a brief pitch (2 or 3-sentences) as well as an abbreviated CV to editors Jolie Braun (braun.338[at]osu.edu) and Jess Clark (jclark3[at]brocku.ca) any time before 20 February 2026.

If you have any questions about the theme and how your work could fit in the special issue, please get in touch by email. Accepted proposals will be invited to join the quarterly volume on ‘Personal Recipe Collections.’ For full instructions and more detailed information on length and image requirements please see the Open Call for Contributors.

Topics could include:

• Case studies of personal recipe collections

• Explorations of different mediums and formats, including manuscript cookbooks, recipe collections written or inserted in published cookbooks, recipe boxes, recipe scrapbooks or binders, digital collections

• Recipe collecting, information science, and knowledge management

• Personal recipe collections and material culture

• Using personal recipe collections as primary sources to learn about women’s history, local history, cooking and food trends, etc.

• Personal recipe collections of historical figures (such as Georgia O’Keefe’s recipe cards at the Beinecke or Sylvia Plath’s recipe cards, sold at auction in 2021)

• Collecting personal recipe collections (by institutions, communities, collectors, or rare book and manuscript dealers)

• Cataloging, describing, and making personal recipe collections publicly accessible (at libraries, archives, and museums)

• Digitization projects or digital collections featuring personal recipe collections

• Teaching with personal recipe collections

We look forward to reading your pitches.

—The RP Editorial Team