Disability In The Kitchen, Past and Present
In this image: a photograph of the five books discussed in this entry
When you were little and came down with a virus, were you put on a regimen of Saltines and flat ginger ale, or on clear liquids only? If so, then you were like my great uncle Simon--for whom, a hundred years ago, my immigrant grandmother supposedly cooked softened calf’s liver to accommodate his “weak stomach”—namely, you were involved in what used to be called “invalid cookery.”
Yes, there is a food history angle to disability, and recently I’ve acquired a fistful of cookbooks, published over a span of more than a century, which illustrate the evolution of disability in the kitchen.
First up is “The Laurel Health Cookery,” by Evora Bucknum Perkins. Published in 1911 in Massachusetts, this volume weaves together insights from an era when kitchens lacked electricity—no refrigerators, blenders, microwaves, or air fryers—along with plenty of quaint ideas and curious lore. There is straightforward advice like “Try to have something for a quick fire. If you are out of the reach of gas, a well-cared-for two-burner oil stove will do good service.” But there are also puzzlers like this: “the cogs of an egg beater should never be wet; when they are wet once, its usefulness is impaired.” It recommends using empty tin cans as food containers, and calls them “gun boats” for some reason (a modern equivalent, I suppose, might be people who refer to takeout containers as “New York Tupperware”).
Perkins’ book is health focused, with warnings like “Very hot food ought not to be taken into the stomach . . . the stomach can become debilitated,” and “Many people can digest cream better when accompanied by an acid fruit.” Remarkably enough for 1911, it is a vegetarian cookbook. It refers, oddly, to high-protein sources like nuts, beans and eggs as “true meats,” and promotes meat substitutes like “trumese” (a sliceable product of nuts in gluten, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, the boxed cereal magnate).
“The Laurel Health Cookery” includes a chapter on “invalid foods,” but those pages do little more than advocate fasting, or small and simple meals of fruit or gruel, without any explanation. There is almost no focus on what we would recognize as nutrition.
Despite admonitions like “sugar clogs the system. It hinders the working of the living machine,” and “the best food on this planet is ripe fruit,” the suggested menus are extremely heavy in starches. Take this dinner idea: “Baked beans and brown bread; scalloped potatoes; pumpkin or water custard pie; nuts and raisins.”
Going through this book felt like falling into a sort of parallel universe.
Next up is “Invalid Cookery,” a guide for the student nurse and “her care of invalids.” It is a slim, undated manual. I believe it was published in the 1920s though, because apparently sliced bread had not yet been invented when it was put together. The opening sections include a discussion of nutritive building blocks like carbohydrates, calories, and so forth, along with advice on presentation (small quantities of food, daintily served on trays accompanied by a flower, is best for the overall health of the patient).
There is little discussion of the healthfulness of one food over another, still less any attempt at “food X is good for Y condition.” But there are recipes aplenty, provided in very short and simple terms altogether lacking in spices, herbs or flavorings. Some of them are startling, like “Brains and Bacon,” or “Liver Juice” (produced by squeezing the liquid out of nearly raw liver). The authors direct that this strange nostrum should be “served cold,” and that “orange juice may be taken after it.”
I’ll pass on that, thank you very much. Likewise the “Sweet Omelette” (eggs cooked with sugar and jam).
Moving forward many years, to the 1970s, we have “Cook Book,” presented by “Friend of the Disabled,” in Pensacola, Florida. This is a spiral-bound collection of recipes that was apparently compiled and distributed as a fundraiser. It’s a cute-looking production, with chapters marked by colored sheets of paper bearing post-hippie-era line drawings (one depicts a squirrel inhaling the fragrance of a daisy, sort of a tree-dwelling version of Ferdinand the Bull). Chapters include Appetizers, Soups, One Dish Quick Meals, Main Dishes, and so forth.
The recipes are okay—they include some unique Southern items, like “Frito Pie”—and the name of the contributor appears at the bottom of each entry. But in spite of the organization’s disability-referencing name, nothing in the book’s contents is disability-specific in any way.
By this point I was becoming frustrated. Book after book implied some sort of benefit for people with disabilities, but so far not one of them actually provided any clear ideas or suggested any actual impacts for the health or convenience of the intended consumer. The actual food recipients were less than afterthoughts. They seemed completely irrelevant.
So I turned with interest to the next volume, “The Wheelchair Gourmet,” by Mary Blakeslee. Published in 1981, it is subtitled “a cookbook for the disabled.” Sure enough, the author is a woman in a wheelchair. We’re certain to find something of value here, I thought.
The book includes some decent suggestions for wheelchair-using cooks looking to set up ergonomically functional kitchens—things like long-handled cooking implements; an electric knife; a mirror on a stick for peering into pots on the rear of the stove; and turntables, or “lazy susans,” to facilitate accessing the contents of cupboards. To this extent “The Wheelchair Gourmet” is a real advance over the books we’ve seen so far.
But while the author is a charming stylist, the emphasis here, as in “The Laurel Health Cookery,” is on the author’s notions of how to prepare food healthfully, and in this book that means next to no use of sugar, flour or salt, and an insistence that vegetables should be eaten raw, or nearly so. I think these elements will leave most of the potential audience for this book looking elsewhere for culinary inspiration.
At this point I went online and ordered one more book, with the decidedly in-your-face title of “Crip Up The Kitchen.” I wasn’t hoping for too much. But once again I was mistaken.
Subtitled “tools, tips and recipes for the disabled cook,” “Crip Up The Kitchen” begins with a lengthy chapter on organizing a kitchen usable by people who are in wheelchairs, of short stature, have low grip strength, or are neurodivergent. The goal is to make food preparation both practical and fun, and to that end the author, Jules Sherred, sets out a list of recommended appliances ranging from modern--like instant pots, air fryers, and vacuum sealers—to old-fashioned (a step stool). Shopping, food preparation and storage are broken down into step-at-a-time processes, ranked by the required degrees of physical and mental resources (measured in “spoons,” as per Spoon Theory). Recognizing that the disability community is often a low income community, there is an emphasis on economy as well.
The bulk of this 200-page volume is devoted to recipes, organized in ascending order of difficulty. Among the low-intensity dishes is butter chicken; a medium-level dish is hamburger stew; a high-intensity entry is matzo ball soup. All the recipes include detailed but visually uncluttered sections on equipment, ingredients, and directions, along with estimates for prep and cooking time, type of cuisine, level of heat, calories, and suggestions for how to store the final product.
Handsomely bound and gorgeously illustrated, “Crip Up The Kitchen” feels expensive, yet it is available in print or electronic media at a bargain price. Compared to the older books above it is revolutionary in its practical and aesthetic appeal, and in the seriousness with which it addresses cooking by people with disabilities.
So there you have it, the disability rights revolution as told through food history—five books over 110 years. Bon appetit!
The books reviewed in this entry include:
“The Laurel Health Cookery,” by Evora Bucknum Perkins, the Laurel Publishing Company, 1911.
“Invalid Cookery and Nutrition,” compiled by Dorothy M. Giles and Ellen M. Rapley, the Ruskin Press.
“Cook Book,” sponsored by Friends of the Disabled, QP Publishing.
“The Wheelchair Gourmet,” by Mary E. Blakeslee, Beaufort Books, Inc.
“Crip Up The Kitchen,” by Jules Sherred, Touchwood Editions, 2023.
DHNYC thanks Renee Gershman for her assistance in the preparation of this entry.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News, https://ablenews.com/
