Jan Longone, a curious, warm-hearted, and diligent food scholar who started a mail-order cookbook business from her basement in Michigan, which led to friendships with towering culinary figures such as Julia Child and grew into one of the largest cookbook collections in the country, died on August 3. at Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was 89.
The death, at a hospice center, was confirmed by her husband, Daniel Longone.
Ms. Longone’s career had the most practical beginnings. In the 1950s, when she and her husband were both at Cornell University, where she studied Chinese history and he studied chemistry, some fellow students invited them to dinner where they served the Indian food they had eaten as children.
The students asked Ms. Longone to answer a typical American meal. She realized she had no idea what that could be or how to prepare it, so she went to a library and discovered the vast world of cookbooks.
That journey led to a lifetime of collecting food-related books and ephemera, including pamphlets about Jell-O, instructions for kitchen appliances, and the country’s first cookbook, “American Cookery,” written by Amelia Simmons and published in 1796. That book counts. 47 pages contain recipes for pumpkin pie and the first combination of cranberry sauce to complement roast turkey, Thanksgiving stalwarts that endure today.
She also provided an 1871 text that is believed to be the nation’s first Jewish cookbook.
Ms. Longone had a penchant for charity and community cookbooks from the 1800s and early 1900s, which she said painted a picture of the country’s scientific advances, immigration patterns, and cultural shifts.
Although her collection was largely Eurocentric and lacked elements of the American immigration narrative, it contained the only original copy of the first known American cookbook by a black woman. Food scientists have long believed that this distinction belonged to “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” published in 1881. But then a West Coast bookseller called Ms. Longone and asked if she might have a fragile 39-page book by Malinda. wanted Russell, “A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Coupons for the Kitchen,” printed by a Paw Paw, Michigan newspaper, in 1866. She paid $200.
Janice Barbara Bluestein was born on 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.
She met Mr. Longone when they were teenagers and spent their summers swimming in Revere Beach, near Boston. “I splashed her and she turned and said, ‘You’re going to be sorry,'” Mr. Longone said in a telephone interview. They married in 1954, after graduating from then Bridgewater State Teachers College (now Bridgewater State University) with a bachelor’s degree in history.
Mr. Longone, a wine enthusiast, soon became an enthusiastic partner in his wife’s literary pursuits. The two sorted out small bookstores on their summer drives from their home near the University of Michigan, where Mr. Longone was a professor, to Massachusetts and later on long journeys to Europe.
In 1972 Ms. Longone realized she could sell some of their acquisitions and started the Wine and Food Library, a mail order bookstore. Her reputation grew with her collection. James Beard became a regular. Before long, the basement of their modest home was filled with books that became the hub of a growing culinary movement.
“Every day I got a 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 by writers such as MFK Fisher (whom she knew, of course) and less ostentatious books, such as ‘Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book’ (1950). She had a particular fondness for Gourmet magazine, which began 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 except the rare March issue. 1941.
Ruth Reichl, who chaired Gourmet from 1999 until Condé Nast closed it in 2009, said Ms. Longone was one of the first to understand the power of history told through the lens of chefs.
“She knew the value of looking at cookbooks without a historian’s perspective,” Ms Reichl said in an interview.
Longone’s collection, nearly 25,000 items strong, became the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan and the antecedent to dozens of other culinary libraries. It also ensured the development of academic programs for food studies.
“Other libraries weren’t interested in collecting food stuff, but she knew exactly what she had and why it mattered,” Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University, wrote in an email. “I was stunned when I met her and wanted all of that for NYU.” Ms. Nestle would set up the country’s first food study program, which relies heavily on the collection of food and cooking materials in NYU’s Fales Library.
Ms. Longone also influenced a new generation of booksellers who, like her, realized the importance of cataloging rare and essential works on cooking and drinking.
“Her legacy is vital to my existence,” said Celia Sack, owner of the San Francisco bookstore Omnivore Books.
Ms. Longone had a significant impact on modern American restaurant culture, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, when she rejected the limitations of continental cuisine and began to develop a more eclectic, regional, and adventurous style.
She was a yenta for chefs, passing on and connecting her vast food knowledge before Instagram provided a space for networking and allowing them to search the web for a particular cooking style with a few keystrokes.
Using material from her collection, Ari Weinzweig, along with Paul Saginaw, opened Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor and his artisan mail-order food business in 1982.
“I knew relatively little about food and we were about to start selling artisan cheese and smoked fish, so I had to learn,” he said. “As a history student, it was much more exciting for me to go to Jan’s basement to look at books than to go to a candy store.”
Without that basement of books, Chef Rick Bayless said, he might not have had his career. In the late 1970s, he had taken a year off from writing a dissertation on anthropology to teach cooking classes. He turned to Mrs. Longone for help.
“She led you up the rickety back stairs to her basement with all those dehumidifiers on and these metal shelves full of books and you could stay there as long as you wanted,” he said in an interview. “I thought I struck gold.”
She told the editor of The Ann Arbor Observer about Mr. Bayless and his classes, and the subsequent article launched his cooking career.
Ms. Longone founded the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor in 1983 as a way to bring people together interested in the study of culinary history and gastronomy. She was a founding member of the American Institute of Wine and Food and served on the editorial board of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. She also hosted “Adventures in Gastronomy,” believed to be the first food show on public radio, and was a judge for numerous cookbook awards.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her brother, Bernard Bluestein.
Despite her generosity with cooking information, Ms. Longone kept her mouth shut about her sources. But she always gave aspiring collectors the same advice: “If you see something you want, buy it.”
“I’ve been guilty of this mistake too,” she said. “I never regret the things I bought, but I do regret some things I didn’t buy.”