Behind every casserole dish and Jell-O salad is a woman whose name we’ve forgotten. This essay explores the invisible labor of women preserved in the pages of community cookbooks.

Before food was passion or pleasure, it was survival. In the clattering textile mills of 1860s Maine, my ancestor Brigit ate just enough to endure—and in doing so, she passed down more than she knew.

Despite being dead for nearly 120 years, Brigit Finerty has been many things to me over the course of my life…

Folk & Fare is the meeting of storytelling, genealogy, folklore and the food ways we inherit from the ones that come before.