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Visiting With Some Old Foodie Friends: Brooklyn in Love, Picnic in Provence, Home is Where the Eggs Are, and This Might Be Too Personal

27 Dec

This year marked my 20th year here at the library, which of course got me feeling nostalgic about back when I first started working here in 2003, a newly graduated MLIS student, single and excited about living just across the river from that legendary city, NYC, though Hoboken is not shabby on its own legends either. Although the blog hasn’t been around quite that long it got me to thinking about some of the memoirs, I had reviewed early on and what their authors might have been up to now. Here are a few. Like me they found love and started families, but of course their adventures in their delicious “next chapter,” as Amy Thomas describes her own part two, only continued.

Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family and Finding Yourself
by Amy Thomas
In 2012, Amy Thomas published Paris My Sweet, a memoir about the years she spent in her dream job getting to write ad copy for Louis Vuitton in the city of lights. When I blogged about it back then, it was clear that as much as Thomas enjoyed and celebrated Paris, it wasn’t where she was going to put down roots. In 2018’s Brooklyn in Love, on the other hand, it definitely has more a feeling of figuring out where her long term home is. As with Paris My Sweet where she includes recommendations for bakeries and Cafes in Paris, In Brooklyn in Love she focuses on the unique and delicious places she encounters in Brooklyn. I think it is notable that I felt of the previous work that, “wonderful descriptions of the sweets is what truly caries this work,” but in this memoir I was more interested in what she had to say about her life, her relationship, and her first experiences of motherhood.

Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes
by Elizabeth Bard
I had also blogged back in 2012 about another French Memoir along with Thomas’s, Elizabeth Bard’s Lunch in Paris. Unlike Thomas, Bard married a Parisian and became of French citizen. That book as does her more recent memoir (2015) Picnic in Provence include recipes at the ends of chapters. This memoir follows her pregnancy and adventures in motherhood. At first Bard is a bit disconnected from motherhood and feels like she hasn’t fully bonded with her son, but then she uses a shared love of cooking to form a stronger connection with him. The later half of the memoir also focuses on her and her husband starting an artisanal ice cream shop that serves scoops inspired by the local Provencal flavors that they have fallen in love with and her efforts to become officially a French citizen. Francophiles, foodies, and other moms and entrepreneurs will find this book a treat! Bard followed up Picnic in Provence in 2017 with Dinner Chez Moi: 50 French Secrets to Joyful Eating and Entertaining, a book of advice and easy to follow recipes.

Home is Where the Eggs Are: Farmhouse Food for the People You Love
by Molly Yeh
Molly Yeh rose to culinary fame with her award winning food blog, My Name is Yeh. Her memoir Molly on the Range published in 2016, follows her time studying classical music at Julliard and her childhood in a Chicago suburb in addition to her moving to sugar beet farm that her in-laws had been running for generations. Since her first book came out Molly has gone on to being a host of the Food Network show Girl Meets Farm as well as hosting some of their food competition shows. Her cookbook Home is Where the Eggs Are: Farmhouse Food for the People You Love published in 2022, is in a way a reverse of Picnic in Provence which is a memoir with some recipes, in that it is a cookbook with bits of memoir included in each section and recipes including pictures of Molly, her husband, and oldest daughter throughout. Her recipes take inspiration from her own Jewish and Chinese heritage as well as her husband’s family Scandinavian/Midwest background, but I find there is also sort of playfulness often that is uniquely her own. Several recipes in the book caught my eye including goat cheese and dill baked eggs, cheesy kimchi fried rice, and watermelon basil bug juice. We made her marzipan chocolate chunk cookie recipe this year as one of our Christmas bakes and they were DELICIOUS!

This Might Be Too Personal
by Alyssa Shelasky
Alyssa Shelasky chronicled her nervousness about cooking while dating a celebrity chef (Spike Mendelhsohn) in Apron Anxiety which I had found to be a fun read. It was interesting to hear about Shelasky overcoming her cooking fear even if her relationship with “chef” doesn’t last. This Might Be Too Personal contains essays, mainly about Shelasky’s life chronicling her time working for New York Magazine’s Sex Diaries and eventually adapting them to a TV series as well as her choice to become a single mom before finding the love of her life. There is a brief mention of catching up with “chef” who is now happily married. Those looking for a foodie memoir will enjoy her previous work, but for fans of gossipy party girl fun similar to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City memoirs balanced with sweet mom moments with Shelasky’s daughter Hazel, this will be an enjoyable read. The audiobook made me feel like I was hearing about the adventures from one of my bffs.

Written by:
Aimee Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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What is a finding aid, and how can I use one?

13 Dec
Portrait of Mr. Hatfield, first HPL Librarian. Created by Enid Bell-11/7/36

If you’re doing historical research on a subject, you may have stumbled upon a finding aid before. It’s essentially a table of contents for an archival collection, allowing researchers to check quickly to see if a repository has the thing they’re looking for. In the now decade-plus time I’ve spent in the archival field, I’ve written my fair share of finding aids, and I’ve probably used even more written by other people. Let’s break down how to read one and how they work.

Collection Information
On the first page (or second page, if the finding aid has a separate title page) you’ll find some basic collection information. This will include things like the inclusive and bulk dates, the extent of the collection in linear feet, and the physical condition of the collection. The inclusive dates are the entire date range the collection’s materials encompass, and the bulk dates are where the majority of the materials fall between. Linear feet is actually measured in box width on shelves, not in the papers being spread out – a collection that’s 1 linear foot is usually just in one Hollinger box, a specialized acid-free storage box used for archival papers.  Condition will generally be listed on a scale between ‘excellent’ and ‘poor,’ with ‘poor’ often being a shorthand for ‘falling apart.’ Be extra gentle when working with collections rated below ‘fair’ condition! 

Historical Notes, Scope and Content, and Custodial History
After the basic information, you’ll likely see some historical notes regarding the collection you’re looking at. Biographical notes describe the lives of the important people the collection pertains to. In the most recent finding aid I did for the library, the two most important figures were our first and second head librarians, Thomas Hatfield and his wife Nina Hatfield, so I wrote a brief biographical sketch for each. I then filled in some historical notes on the library itself. Scope and content just describes the extent of the collection – the last finding aid I worked on was contained within 8 Hollinger boxes, which means the scope and content is listed as “eight boxes of materials pertaining to the history of Hoboken Public Library and the City of Hoboken, New Jersey.” 

You’ll often see related materials listed here, as well. This is a list of collections and other items that are connected or similar to the collection you’re looking at currently, which can help with research. There may also be access conditions or restrictions, because sometimes collections cannot be accessed by the public for various reasons, including privacy, sensitivity, or fragility of the records. This will also usually tell you who to contact if you’re interested in accessing the collection for research. 

Preferred Citations and Subject Headings
Finally, you’ll come to the preferred citations and subject headings. The preferred citation just lists how you’d cite the collection in a research paper, which is incredibly useful if you’re a student or an academic. Unfortunately, we generally don’t explain how to format those citations, but there are plenty of resources elsewhere to help you do that correctly. If you’re a history student or working historian, you may be using Turabian.

The subject headings are a shorthand way to see what subjects are featured within the collection, and they’re often taken from a controlled list. The Library of Congress has one such list. These help when you’re searching a database for specific subjects. 

Box Contents
This is probably why you’re here! Now you’ve found the meat of the finding aid – the actual listed contents of the collection, box by box, folder by folder. Here you’ll be able to check to see if anything might be relevant to your research, and if it is, you can request to view it! If the archive isn’t within traveling distance for you, sometimes archivists are willing to scan the items for you to see them if they haven’t already been digitized. 

For the finding aid I did most recently, there were eight boxes, and each box had many folders in it, so the actual box contents listing ended up being 18 pages long! Luckily, it’s searchable, so if you’re looking for something specific, it’s not so hard to figure out what box it’s in!  That’s the basic gist of how to use a finding aid! If you have further questions, the archivist on hand will always be happy to help you out. A good archivist will want you to be able to access the materials for research, after all! 

(Want to see the finding aid I used to write this blog post? See Below!)

I would really love it if you used our collections to do your own research!

Written by: 
Steph Diorio
HPL Archivist/Local History Librarian at HPL

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