SAVORING TASTE OF EQUALITY
Justices, judges lend personal recipes for free digital cookbook
Community cookbooks have a special place in my heart. Long before home cooks turned to Pinterest boards and food blogs for ideas, these collections offered the inside scoop on must-have recipes from friends and neighbors.
The really good compilations, though, are about more than food: They embrace the charm and quirks of family traditions and reveal tantalizing bits of history.
Beginning in the 1860s, these cookbooks proved an effective way to fundraise and reach women at home with messages of inspiration and motivation — something suffragists put to use more than a century ago as part of their voting-rights campaign.
In a nod to that history, and in celebration of 100 years since the 19th Amend
ment was ratified the American Bar Association Commission on the Nineteenth Amendment has assembled a free, downloadable cookbook with recipes from Supreme Court justices, judges, lawyers, scholars and others in the legal field.
“The Nineteenth Amendment Centennial Cookbook: 100 Recipes for 100 Years,” available at 19thamendmentcookbook.com, applauds the courage of the suffragists. Artwork, quotes and archival images provide key historical context.
“Cookbooks have deep roots with the suffragists, who used them as their ‘messenger’ to promote women’s right to vote,” said Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an email. McKeown, a La Jolla resident, is chair of the ABA Commission on the 19th Amendment and coeditor of the cookbook, along with Kelsey Matevish.
“These women overcame the challenges of the 1918 pandemic and went on to achieve ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920,” McKeown said. “In this 100th anniversary year, the ABA Commission on the 19th Amendment gathered recipes from legal luminaries as a way to celebrate this milestone and a special way to bring family, friends, and communities together during COVID-19. In the spirit of the suffragists, the digital cookbook is free to download as an ebook or pdf.”
Well-organized chapters cover breakfast to dessert, with one section devoted to comfort food. Contributors include some familiar names: Janet Napolitano, Judge Merrick Garland, Nina Totenberg, Amal Clooney, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (whose Quick Ratatouille recipe is below) and her daughter, Jane Ginsburg. Hillary Clinton adds chocolate chip cookies. Justice Neil Gorsuch reveals kitchen expertise with a Colorado green chile stew.
Some submissions are quick hits; others, long and detailed. Personal recollections of these preparations, always one of the best parts of such cookbooks, make page-flipping a pleasure. Among them is Garland’s addendum to his greatgrandmother’s Gefilte Fish recipe, which states: “Place live fish in half-filled bathtub until ready to begin.”
“No one in my generation has followed the first paragraph,” he says.
Whether you favor oldschool Green Marshmallow Salad or Peach-Tarragon Shortcake or envision a kitchen battle between Salvadorean Chile Rellenos and Guatemalan Chile Rellenos, it’s all in there.
And one hundred years later, in divisive times, food is still the great unifier.