Jan Longone is curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the William L. Clements Library on the University of Michigan campus.
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What really cemented her stature in the field was the Wine and Food Library, an antiquarian culinary bookshop she opened in 1972 and operated by mail order and appointment only. Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne, a former food editor for the New York Times, dropped Longone's name as the go-to for out-of-print cookbooks. "And every day I would get a phone call saying 'James Beard told me to call you. Julia Child told me to call you. Craig Claiborne told me to call you.' And that started the bookshop," Longone says. Her inventory also provided fodder for a dozen exhibitions of culinary ephemera.
That page-worn cookbook from the area’s thrift shop on your kitchen shelf or the recipe collection you turn to from a city’s Junior League share a powerful legacy. So demonstrates Jan Longone, an Ann Arborite, who was honored by the New York Public Library and the Culinary Historians of New York last week.
- Dan Longone's Grape Expectations at the Clements, Arbor Vinous, Joel Goldberg for the Ann Arbor Chronicle, May 2009
In 1975, Jan Longone began to host what she believes to be public radio’s first culinary show, Adventures in Gastronomy, which originated at the studios of WUOM.
Jan (Janice Bluestein) Longone is Curator of American Culinary History at the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is the proprietor of the Wine and Food Library, the oldest culinary antiquarian bookshop in America and founder and honorary chair of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor.
