Thinking Inside the Box Lunch

story by Amber Alhadeff

Professor Thomas Devaney’s students learned the true mean­ing of researching primary sources in their Fall 2007 English course, “Art of Eating and Life.”

In 2006, the University of Pennsylvania inherited the cookery collec­tion of Chef Fritz Blank, who lived most of his life in Philadelphia and was the executive chef and owner of the city’s Deux Cheminees. Much of the collection—boxes of recipe books, photocopies, and pamphlets orga­nized by food type—remained virtually untouched until each member of Devaney’s class chose and explored a particular box to do research for an essay. Boxes ranged from common categories like meats, desserts, or fruits, to intriguing collections like condiments or JELL-O.

The “Box Lunch Project” required students to spend time in the Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, a section of Van Pelt almost exclu­sively frequented by graduate students, professors, and librarians. Students found their information from original documents, straight from the source. “[Students] were not finding many references, if any, about the information from their boxes online,” Devaney said. “How could something so interesting not be on Google?” he joked.

Devaney was so impressed by the resulting essays that he col­laborated with Penn Libraries to create a book called The Library as Learning Matrix: The Art of the Box Lunch. The book is a collection of essays, including one introductory piece written by Devaney and four student projects. It features rec­ipes, diagrams, and photos from cookbooks and pamphlets in the original collection.

The project touched on the most basic principles of education: research and exploration, reinterpretation and creation. “The stu­dents connected various parts of their own world to both Chef Blank’s and the world he collected and gathered,” Devaney said. “Ultimately, I realized the Box Lunch Project was not about archival research or even a writing assignment at all. It was, in fact, about education in its most elemental sense.” It is Devaney’s hope that the project was a pivotal experience in the academic lives of each student in his class.