Alyse Delaney

Oyster Bisque: a zine about food and archives

Spring 2024

The first issue of “Oyster Bisque” is inspired by the women who worked or studied at the Pratt Institute School of Household Science & Arts in the early 20th century. Poems constructed with found phrases from the Pratt Archives are interspersed with personal anecdotes and laid upon re-photographed images from the Home Economics program. The zine concludes with a recipe for oyster bisque, which is meant to symbolize familial belonging and personal pleasure. The project as a whole examines how the archival imagination, when combined with the gestures of historically-informed cooking, can illuminate emotional experiences that otherwise resist traditional preservation.

Archival Sources

Isabel Ely Lord Papers. Pratt Institute Archives, Brooklyn, New York.
Pratt Institute Archives Photograph Collection. Pratt Institute Archives, Brooklyn, New York.
Records of the School of Home Economics. Pratt Institute Archives, Brooklyn, New York.
Women's Club, 1909-1935. Vertical File Collection. Pratt Institute Archives, Brooklyn, New York.
Women's Club, 1940. Buildings and Grounds Collection. Pratt Institute Archives, Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliographic Sources

Escoffier, A. A Guide to Modern Cookery; W. Heinemann, 1935.
Fisher, MFK. Consider the Oyster. New York: North Point Press, 1941.
Keen, Adelaide. With a Saucepan over the Sea; Quaint and Delicious Recipes from the Kitchens of Foreign Countries. Little, Brown, and Co., 1902.
Spencer, Edward. Cakes & Ale; a Dissertation on Banquets, Interspersed with Various Recipes, More or Less Original, and Anecdotes, Mainly Veracious. 4th ed. Stanley Paul & Co., 1913.