Jan Longone, influential scholar of food history, dies at age of 89

Jan Longone, a curious, cordial and diligent food scholar who started a mail-order cookbook business from her Michigan basement that led to friendships with towering culinary figures like Julia Child and grew into one of the nation’s great cookbook collections, died Aug. 3 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was 89.

The death, at a hospice center, was confirmed by her husband, Daniel Longone.

Jan Longone’s career had the most practical of beginnings. In the 1950s, when she and her husband were both in graduate school at Cornell University, where she studied Chinese history and he studied chemistry, some fellow students invited them to a dinner party where they served the Indian food they had grown up eating.

The students asked Longone to reciprocate with a typical American meal. She realized she had no idea what that might be or how to prepare it, so she went to a library and discovered the vast world of cookbooks.

That trip led to a lifetime of collecting food-related books and ephemera, including pamphlets about Jell-o, instructions for kitchen appliances and the nation’s first cookbook, “American Cookery,” written by Amelia Simmons and published in 1796. That book’s 47 pages contain recipes for pumpkin pie and the first pairing of cranberry sauce to complement roast turkey, Thanksgiving stalwarts that endure today.

She also secured an 1871 text believed to be the nation’s first Jewish cookbook.

Longone had a fondness for charity and community cookbooks from the 1800s and early 1900s, which she thought painted a picture of the nation’s scientific advancement, immigration patterns and cultural shifts.

Although her collection was largely Eurocentric and missed elements of the American immigration story, it included the only original copy of the first known American cookbook by a Black woman. Food scholars had long believed that distinction belonged to “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” published in 1881. But then a West Coast bookseller called Longone and asked her if she might want a fragile 39-page book by Malinda Russell, “A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen,” printed by a newspaper in Paw Paw, Michigan, in 1866. She paid $200.

Janice Barbara Bluestein was born July 31, 1933, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Her parents were Ukrainian immigrants and secular Jews. Her father, Alexander Bluestein, was a restaurant equipment sales manager. Her mother, Edith (Gropman) Bluestein, made the family table, which was often filled with classic Ashkenazi dishes, the center of their domestic life.

Janice met Daniel Longone when they were teenagers who spent their summers swimming at Revere Beach, near Boston. “I splashed her, and she turned around and said, ‘You’ll be sorry,’” her husband said. They married in 1954, after she graduated from what was then Bridgewater State Teachers College (now Bridgewater State University) with a bachelor’s degree in history.

Daniel Longone, a wine aficionado, soon became an enthusiastic partner in his wife’s literary pursuits. The two searched out small bookstores on their summer drives from their home near the University of Michigan, where Daniel Longone was a professor, to Massachusetts, and later during extensive travels to Europe.

In 1972, Jan Longone realized that she could sell some of their acquisitions and began the Wine and Food Library, a mail-order bookshop. Her reputation grew along with her collection. James Beard became a regular customer. Before long, the basement of their modest house was full of books that became the nexus of a growing culinary movement.

“Every day I would get a phone call saying, ‘James Beard told me to call you. Julia Child told me to call you. Craig Claiborne told me to call you,’” she said in a 2012 interview with the weekly magazine Concentrate.

She sold literary works from the likes of author M.F.K. Fisher (whom she knew, of course) and less ostentatious books, like “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book” (1950). She had a particular fondness for Gourmet magazine, which started when her husband gave her a copy of the first Gourmet cookbook, followed by a $50 lifetime subscription. Over the years, they collected every issue, save the rare March 1941 edition.

Ruth Reichl, who presided over Gourmet from 1999 until Condé Nast shuttered it in 2009, said Longone was one of the first to understand the power of history told through the lens of cooks.

“She knew the value of looking at cookbooks unmitigated by a historian’s perspective,” Reichl said.