Cooking with history 

By Andrew Liptak

In February, instructor Sean Morrison and his students at the Green Mountain Technology and Career Center (GMTCC) of Hyde Park arrived at the Vermont History Center in Barre. They were coming for a special research project: learn about Vermont’s culinary history by delving into VHS’s large collection of community cookbooks to get ideas for the meal that they would be preparing for the upcoming Vermont Eats: The French-Canadian Experience. 

For several years, VHS has hosted this unique culinary event, one that blends the history of Vermont’s immigrant communities with the food they brought with them. In years past, we explored the Italian community that settled in Barre and the Eastern Europeans that formed Burlington’s Little Jerusalem. For 2025, we’re headed to northern Vermont to explore its French-Canadian heritage. 

GMTCC Instructor Sean Morrison

Morrison introduced his students after they arrived. They’re part of an intensive program that sees them spending much of their time between class work and the school’s kitchens, where they study everything from baking to butchering. The eventual goal of the program is to get them interested in the food industry. Morrison brings a considerable amount of real-world experience to his classroom; he’s worked as a cook in Paris, New York City, and Boston, and explained that he wanted to prepare his students for a career in the culinary world. 

This visit in February was designed to get them thinking about dishes that they’ll be making for this event. There was a lot that he wanted them to find; the connections between Quebec and Vermont include everything from the climate to trade routes to the families that count members on both sides of the international border. All of those elements have an impact on the types of food that people were consuming. 

A group of GMTCC students examining cookbooks at the Leahy Library in Barre.

A key part of their research was digging through old cookbooks. These volumes are a strong connection to the past and provide a wealth of information about the people who wrote and used them. Because of the short growing season and Vermont’s remote nature, Vermonters were constantly looking to the future to make the most of the resources they had. 

He and his students pointed to a range of things that they gleaned from their dive into the cookbooks that were interesting: community corn roasts were common in Lamoille County, while individual sugar shacks seemed to have their own spin on sugar on snow. Ingredients such as oysters or fiddleheads were harder to come by because of the distance or short summers, and Vermonters would have to make the most of them.

A trio of cookbooks from VHS's collection.

As the students poured over cookbooks ranging from E. Donald Asselin’s A French-Canadian Cookbook to Loren B. Lord’s The Household Receipt Book to Audrey Alley Gorton’s The Venison Book: How to Dress, Cut Up, and Cook Your Deer to Lucy Emerson’s New-England Cookery or the Art of Dressing All Kinds of Flesh, Fish, and Vegetables, they found no shortage of inspiration — insights that will not only guide them for Vermont Eats, but in their own careers in the kitchens they find themselves in when they graduate. 

You can find out more about Vermont Eats here.