How Lesbian Luminaries Put Together a Groundbreaking Cookbook - ‘Whoever Said Dykes Can’t Cook?’ combined art, food, and fundraising.
In the United States, women’s groups have published fundraising cookbooks since the Civil War. Carefully compiled booklets filled with recipes can be powerful money-making tools for all kinds of causes. So when Maya Contenta and Victoria Ramstetter published a fundraising cookbook in 1983, it was not unusual in terms of strategy. But one glance at the title makes it obvious that Contenta and Ramstetter were indeed breaking new ground. The Whoever Said Dykes Can’t Cook? Cookbook, published in support of the Cincinnati Lesbian Activist Bureau, ushered in a new genre of fundraising cookbooks for $#@! organizations.
Whoever Said Dykes Can’t Cook? was actually not the first lesbian cookbook. That honor belongs to The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), a memoir-with-recipes about Toklas’s relationship with the modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Whoever Said Dykes Can’t Cook? was also preceded by The Political Palate (1980), a cookbook published by the lesbian-feminist Bloodroot Collective restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Contenta and Ramstetter included recipes from The Political Palate in their own cookbook, and followed the restaurant’s lead in only publishing vegetarian recipes.
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lesbian-cookbook