Are you one of the foodies who devoured every butter-laden morsel from the recently released film Julie and Julia, the interwoven tale of legendary chef Julia Child and aspiring cook Julie Powell? If so, you might be interested in the cornucopia of cookbooks and culinary treatises housed in UC San Diego’s Mandeville Special Collections Library. In 1991, the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF), founded by Julia Child (shown here) and Robert Mondavi, gave UCSD its initial gift of approximately 360 cookbooks and other materials documenting culinary history. The UCSD AIWF collection includes such rarities as Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (1610), which features a series of woodcuts depicting culinary implements from the Renaissance kitchen, and Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1814), recognized as the first truly American cookbook. And chocolate lovers will appreciate Acerca del chocolate (1730), a manuscript from Mexico that attempts to rebut the Church’s strictures against the consumption of chocolate. Highlights from the collection will be on display from Oct. 5, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010, near the Mandeville Special Collections Library on the main floor of Geisel Library. As Julia Child might say, with wine glass clasped in hand, bon appetit!  
Contributors to Making Waves: Mario C. Aguilera, ’89, Christine Clark, ’06, Dolores Davies, Caitlin Denham, Raymond Hardie, Kim McDonald
Photography: Munro County Library, Loren McClenahan, Mandeville Special Collections and Scripps Institute of Oceanography |
