I saw this beautiful blossom at a neighbor’s house on my morning walk yesterday. I had to return home and pick up my camera to capture the beauty of this Argentine Giant Cactus. Having to go home for my camera has been happening every few days. At least photography and the treats of spring are making me take extra steps in my walks.
Another treat is having so many blogging friends who every day give me something new to read and appreciate. Also, the encouraging words from you are such a delight. Just an emoji heart, smile and kind words are uplifting. Thank you. Thank you!
Lastly, a treat was corresponding with a person who is cataloguing a huge cookbook collection. I wrote about how he discovered my great grandmother’s cookbooks and sent me the one missing book in my collection HERE.
He contacted me to let me know his story about my great grandmother was up on Cookbook Collectors and Lovers, a Facebook page. It truly touched my heart to see my great grandmother have such a tribute. HERE is a link to the FB page which includes photos of her, plus scanned images of her cookbook covers and recipes.
Cataloging a collection of this size comes with many quiet pleasures, but among the most satisfying is the chance to discover, research, and learn the stories of the men and women who made meaningful contributions to early American culinary history.
I’m sure that names like Marion Harland, Sarah Tyson Rorer, Thomas J. Murrey, Maria Parloa, and Fannie Farmer may come to mind for those of you who collect from and study this era, and rightly so. But for every name we recognize, there are dozens of others who worked just as thoughtfully, just as ambitiously, and left behind something equally worthy of our attention. Today I want to introduce you to one of them.
This is Ella Leighton Upton Owen, or as she is better known through her books, Mrs. Dewitt C. Owen.
Over the better part of a decade, Ella produced what she called the Ripley Series – ten slim, self-published volumes issued out of Dixon, Illinois, beginning in 1898. They are modest little things, unpretentious in appearance and quietly confident in voice, and I cannot help but think that modesty is part of why history largely passed her by. She did not have a publishing house behind her, a cooking school to her name, or a column in a national magazine. What she did have was something harder to come by- a real point of view and the determination to put it out into the world on her own terms.
To self-publish ten volumes at the turn of the century, as a woman, in a small Illinois city, was no small act. It required not just the writing, but the financing, the distribution, and the sheer persistence to see it through again and again, across many years. She did all of it. While Fannie Farmer was being celebrated in Boston and Maria Parloa was filling lecture halls, Ella was quietly doing the same work from a small city, with no institutional backing and no guarantee that anyone beyond her immediate community and the churches she sold her books to would ever read a word she wrote.
She published anyway. Ten times over.
And she did it entirely by hand. The type was set by her own hand. The pages were gathered, aligned, and bound by her own hand, sewn or tied with thread or ribbon, depending on the volume. Every booklet that left her home was, in a very real sense, a handmade treasure. When you hold one today, you are holding something she touched at every stage of its making, from the first word on the page to the final knot in the binding. There is an intimacy to that which no commercial press could replicate, and which no amount of time has diminished.
Mrs. Owen’s books didn’t arrive all at once for me. That’s not how, as I’ve come to find out, this collection works. She surfaced the way the best discoveries do… a few booklets here, another a week later, more found tucked somewhere unexpected. Each time one was discovered I felt that particular pull that collectors will recognize, the sense that you’re holding something that wants to be understood. These weren’t just culinary curiosities. They were small, delicate, and deliberate objects that someone had conceived, written, financed, and sent out into the world with intention. By the time I found five, I knew I was looking for the rest. By the time I found eight, I was fully hooked.
But eight was where the trail went quiet.
I turned to research, hoping the historical record might fill in what these shelves couldn’t, and found almost nothing. For a woman who had produced ten volumes over the better part of a decade, Mrs. Owen had left behind a remarkably faint paper trail. No obituaries of note. No contemporary reviews I could locate. No mention in the culinary histories that line the shelves. It was as though she had done all of that work and then simply slipped beneath the surface of the record. It was a little frustrating, and more than a little intriguing.
Then I found a blog.
That blog belonged to, as I would soon discover, Mrs. Owen’s great-granddaughter. Her name is Elizabeth Wickham.
That changed everything, and it led somewhere that I could never have expected.
I took a chance and reached out, not entirely sure what to expect. When Elizabeth wrote back, I was genuinely delighted! What followed became one of the genuine privileges of this entire cataloging project.
It was through Elizabeth that I first learned Ella was known to her family simply as Nellie, and with that small detail, the woman behind the booklets suddenly felt a great deal closer. The historical record had given me an author. Elizabeth gave me a person. She filled in the contours that no library ever could, telling me who Nellie was within her family, how she moved through the world, and what she cared about beyond the page. I am still turning much of it over.
And then, in the course of our exchange, I learned something that stopped me in my tracks. Elizabeth and her family did not own the complete Ripley Series. One title, Sixteen Studies in White and Gold, had always eluded them and never made it into their personal collection of Ella’s works.
At the time, the owner of this collection had only a single copy in their possession. But I wrote to Elizabeth and told her that if another surfaced, I would send it out, and that if any collection was going to have it, it would be this one.
Can you believe that not even a week later, I found not one, but two additional copies! I don’t necessarily believe in fate, but you can’t tell me this wasn’t meant to be. The very next day, I put one in the mail. I am extremely pleased to say that their collection is now complete.
There’s a beautiful symmetry in it. Nellie produced these little objects as gifts for the world, and a century later, one found its way home.
Mrs. Wickham is currently working on republishing the complete works of Mrs. Owen in the near future. If you would like to follow her blog and learn more about the life of her great-grandmother, you can find that here-
https://bleuwater.me
Can you imagine when this magnificent cactus is in full bloom? I’ll be checking each day with my camera in hand! What another spring treat!
Post Script: My mom lived next door to her grandmother Nellie during her childhood. Mom told me that Nellie and her husband DeWitt moved their printing press from Dixon, IL to the west coast of Washington State by covered wagon. I never could get my head around that and thought she was making it up. I looked up the dates last night. It totally fits. The dates of their move to the west coast is when people traveled by covered wagon. Is that wild west stuff of what?
