Every ward had one — spiral-bound, typed on a typewriter, funeral potatoes on page whatever. But the story behind the ward cookbook goes back further than the 1970s nostalgia object it's remembered as. From pioneer-trail survival recipes to a 1907 cookbook from a New Zealand mission, to the "Relief Society network" that spread identical Jell-O salads and potato casseroles between wards with zero contact — decades before the Mormon Church built an actual correlation department to standardize anything else — this is the story of an organic, decentralized system of women's labor that's never once been treated as an institutional achievement.
In this episode of What Do You Know Wednesday, Jess and Hannah dig into where the ward cookbook tradition actually comes from, how it got commercialized (and turned into Olympic pins), how it ended up on Netflix, and why it's still happening today — new moms getting handed fresh copies of ward recipe books with zero institutional prompting.
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