The past few weeks, we have been looking at the idea that cookbooks can be history. Here are our thoughts on this.
Historians often use several different sources to help them identify key elements from the past. Many times said sources include journals from the relevant time period or newspapers of current events. Recently in historical studies as food history has become more prevalent historians have turned to cookbooks to get an idea of what food may have been like in regions of the world and throughout different cultures. What is important to remember about cookbooks is that oftentimes they are not reliable to get a good idea of a staple diet. For example, suppose a historian was looking into the diets of 1940s Americans and they used a Betty Crocker holiday cookbook. In that case, it may give an idea of American holiday food, but not into an everyday diet.
Another element of using cookbooks as sources is the possibility that many staple recipes are passed down orally. Sometimes there is a familial recipe that gets passed down for generations and after time it may be recorded completely differently than how the recipe was originally crafted. For example, In the teaching kitchen where our class made a Tartarstan dish called Chak Chak, the presenter explained how she had been making it for years and no longer needed a recipe. We were given the recipe orally with no instruction other than what we saw. If all of us were to go home and attempt to make it from memory it is safe to assume that some things might change. The point of this is that if there is a staple recipe from for example Tartarstan, it may be completely different than it was one hundred years ago. A great use of a cookbook is to see how cultures have evolved around or with food. While the Nestle company is not a culture, with the Nestle Everyday Milk cookbook from the 1930s Nestle made a big push to use their evaporated milk and recipes that could be made with it. In the back, there is a section on how to use it for baby formula. What is interesting about this is that there is a disclaimer that says babies should not only be formula-fed only and should be breastfed. Fast forward almost one hundred years in the future and Nestle is pushing only for formula-fed babies and created a baby food shortage in many countries around the world after pushing breastfeeding out as a social norm. In this instance, historians can use this cookbook to compare it to modern times to see how things like food in society have evolved.
Overall, Cookbooks are a valuable resource that many historians and anthropologists can use to analyze a period. However, as valuable as it can be it is important to always look for implications of bias.
Cookbooks can provide a meaningful introduction to food history. In the creation of a cookbook, the author chose which recipes to include, designated a specific audience, and wrote out each recipe for their audience to understand. However, in assessing a historical cookbook in the present day, a variety of factors go into the understanding of the source. Cookbooks rarely portray the actual foods that were popular at a given time. Rather, many served as a source of entertainment or reading. When looking at these sources in the 21st century, it is important to appreciate the recipes, though with the understanding that they should not be taken as examples of everyday food tradition. One way that historians use these cookbooks is alongside other documents such as tax records. This allows them to put a clearer picture together of a food history.
In the Lilly Library, we were able to look at a variety of old cookbooks. One of the most entertaining was the Kraft Cookbook. This had an array of recipes from breads to desserts, all utilizing a Kraft product. In analyzing this cookbook, the purpose of marketing is important to highlight. The book is a large advertisement for Kraft. Simultaneously, this use of a single brand which is both cheap and accessible promotes the readers to engage with and create the recipes (or at the very least purchase Kraft products). While the average person does not consume Kraft cheesy bread daily, the cookbook suggests a prevalence of the brand within food culture.