Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection
The Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection is a collection of cookbooks and other food-related materials from around the world spanning the 20th and 21st
centuries and collected by the late Barnard Africana Studies and English professor, Quandra Prettyman. The collection is part of the Barnard Foodways Collection (BFC).
The collection includes thousands of books, including community cookbooks (cookbooks that contain recipes submitted by members of community organizations, often congregational or civic groups, frequently including history of the organization, region, or members); food reference books; ingredient, technique, and tool cookbooks; promotional cookbooks; health and nutrition books; children’s cookbooks; frugal and rationing cookbooks; home economics guides; and food studies, food writing, and memoir. The books reflect many regionally specific cooking traditions, including those of the American south and mid-Atlantic, Nordic countries, and the foodways of immigrants and global diasporas.
Please note that the collection is currently in process: we are cataloging it and will make books available gradually! Available books are searchable in CLIO.
For general questions about the collection, please contact Liam Adler (ladler@barnard.edu); external (non-Barnard/Columbia) researchers, please reach out to archives@barnard.edu to arrange a research appointment.
How to access the Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection
Search in CLIO to find all the books in the Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection. Use facets (language, subject, region, genre, etc.) and dates to narrow your search.
Community cookbooks can be found by using the genre term Community cookbooks.
The location in the CLIO record will tell you how to access the book:
CLIO records for books in the collection will show one of these four locations:
- What’s here: cookbooks, with a focus on community cookbooks
- How to access these books:
- These cookbooks are shelved in a special area of the 4th floor of the Barnard Library in the Milstein Center:
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- Barnard and Columbia ID holders: browse the cookbooks on the 4th floor and check them out for the standard loan period for circulating materials. You can also put the books on hold to pick up at the Barnard Library or Columbia’s other libraries.
- External researchers: please contact archives@barnard.edu at least a week before your planned visit. You do not need to share a list of books in the Barnard Quandra Prettyman Collection location as you will be able to browse them in the library. For more information about doing research at the Archives, see our website.
- These cookbooks are shelved in a special area of the 4th floor of the Barnard Library in the Milstein Center:
- What’s here: cookbooks that are stored off-site due to space limitations
- How to access these books:
- Barnard and Columbia ID holders: request using the Pick-Up link and pick up at the Barnard Library in 2-4 days; check them out for the standard loan period for circulating materials.
- External researchers: please contact archives@barnard.edu at least a week before your planned visit. You must request any BearStor location books in advance as we will need to recall them from off-site storage for your visit. For more information about doing research at the Archives, see our website.
- What’s here: histories of food, drink, hospitality, agriculture; food- or cooking-related memoir and essays; home economics, nutrition, and food-related reference books
- How to access these books:
- Barnard and Columbia ID holders: browse these books in the Barnard Library stacks on floors 2, 3, or 4 of the Milstein Center and check them out for the standard loan period for circulating materials. You can also put the books on hold to pick up at the Barnard Library or Columbia’s other libraries.
- External researchers: please contact archives@barnard.edu at least a week before your planned visit. You do not need to share a list of books in the general Barnard location as you will be able to browse them in the library. For more information about doing research at the Archives, see our website.
- Find related materials in the Barnard Foodways Collection.
- What’s here: cookbooks that are too fragile or rare to circulate
- How to access these books:
- Barnard and Columbia ID holders and external researchers: please contact archives@barnard.edu at least one week before your planned visit, including in your message the call numbers of the books you would like to see. For more information about doing research at the Archives, see our website.
- Related materials at the Archives:
- We are currently processing a collection of pamphlets and inserts that were included in the Quandra Prettyman cookbook collection; stay tuned!
- A collection of Quandra Prettyman’s papers (including teaching materials, collected ephemera of Barnard and Columbia Organizations, records of Prettyman’s professional practice, and other collected media) is also available in the archives.
- Email archives@barnard.edu to set up an appointment to work with these collections.
About Quandra Prettyman
Quandra Prettyman was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended Antioch College (1950-1954) and the University of Michigan (1955-1957) before moving to New York City, where she would eventually start as a professor at Barnard College in 1970. Prettyman was the first Black full-time faculty member at Barnard.
As a Barnard professor, she developed a multitude of courses. Her classes on Black literature and particularly Black women writers were some of the first of their kind not only at the college, but in the United States. The first of these courses at Barnard was “Explorations of Black Literature” in 1972; others included “Harlem Renaissance,” “Early African American Literature, 1760-1890,” “Minority Women Writers in the United States,” and “Slavery–The Woman’s Experience.” She taught generations of students and was also a writer herself, with her work appearing in anthologies such as The Poetry of Black America by Arnold Adoff.
Her involvement expanded beyond the classroom, as she participated in several organizations and committees within the university. Notably, she started the Barnard Essay Contest (1991-2003), served as a planning committee member for the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, and took part in events and the life of the Barnard College Women’s Center, later the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Prettyman continued teaching at Barnard until her death in 2021. She taught post her official retirement, offering the course “Explorations of Black Literature: 1760-1890.”
Prettyman’s interests also extended to food studies; she maintained a collection of thousands of cookbooks in her home, citing the importance of these texts as records of women’s stories. These books now form the Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection.
About the Collection
The Quandra Prettyman Cookbook Collection was donated by Johanna Stadler in memory of her mother, Africana Studies and English Literature Professor, Quandra Prettyman. The collection was curated and shaped by Rachel Finn, Research and Instruction Librarian for History & the Humanities, and Martha Tenney, Director of the Archives and Special Collections. The collection was cataloged and processed by Barnard undergraduate student staff (Ella Ahner, Bailey Anderson, Adam Johnson, Lucia Santos, Ruben Carter, Tiana Quon, Chloie Plumber, Gabriela Ogando Ortega, and Lina Infante); library school graduate student staff (Adia Augustin and Olivija Anna Liepa); library specialists (Saraly Vargas, Ji Baek, and Ian Titus); catalogers (Albert Scott); archivists (Jennifer Eberhardt and Martha Tenney); and librarians (Rachel Finn, Jennie Correia, Meredith Wisner, Fannie Ouyang, and Vani Natarajan), with collection support from Johanna Stadler, donor; Liam Adler, Director of Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement; and Kim Hall; Lucyle Hook Professor of English, Professor of Africana Studies.