We humans have probably been talking about food for nearly as long as we have had language. For most of that time the conversations were not written down. Until the early modern period most of the people, men and women, who cooked and baked and preserved were illiterate or bound to silence by trade secrets. Cookbooks are the scarce, flawed, irreplaceable records of some of these voices, some of those realms of knowledge. Some cookbooks were written before any conventions established what a cookbook or a recipe should contain; some were patched together by foraging in the writings of other people. Whatever their claim to originality, they convey craft skills and cultural tradition. They instruct the young, advise caregivers, and feed ambition. In wartime and periods of economic hardship they offer survival strategies.
Cooking and eating must be studied together, and both must be understood in the context of the societies in which they happen. Some cookbooks were written by people who were watching other people cook, some by people who could cook, but were not in the habit of putting their craft knowledge into words. They contain material that cannot be found elsewhere, but they have to be read with a knowledge of their peculiarities. They are not easy to read: there is too much repetition, too many foodstuffs, and too many techniques. Reading a single old cookbook can be fascinating, but after three or four it is impossible to remember where anything is, or how to make comparisons. It is therefore advisable to approach the material in a systematic way. One such method is to begin by looking at a single facet at a time before attempting to see the book as a whole. Better still is to look at a related group of books that have been examined in this way. An inventory of the ingredients and a consideration of their qualities, an analysis of the techniques at the cook’s command, a reconstruction of the kitchen and its equipment, and finally the serving and eating act that all this has led up to: this is the knowledge that will allow the researcher, teacher, or student to understand the social acts of preparing and eating meals in past times and places.
Touch, taste, and smell are the senses least used in research and teaching, and yet the experiences they convey can be remembered for de - cades, whether it is the first meeting with the rich aroma of a taco, the surprising heat of the ginger in Amelia Simmons’s gingerbread recipe from 1796, or the salty, sticky character of a cube of pocket soup, the eighteenth-century ancestor of bouillon cubes. These experiences help people of all ages to engage with the past.
First, some definitions. A cookbook is a manuscript or printed book that contains instructions for preparing food. That is, it contains recipes and may well contain many other kinds of information. A recipe, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something, (now) esp. a dish in cookery.” It defines “receipt” similarly. “Recipe” is little used in England or America before the nineteenth century. Both “recipe” and “receipt” derive from the late Latin recipere, “to receive.” In cookbooks, the instructions are often terse. There may well be no measurements, no information about equipment or timing. “Bukenade: Take fresh flesh, whatever it be. Seethe it with good beef, cast thereto minced onions and good spices, and thicken it with eggs and serve it forth.”1
Authors of cookbooks have often yielded to the temptation to claim or ascribe the invention of certain recipes to themselves or to others. Such claims are frequently untrue or at least unproven. The history of particular foodstuffs has until fairly recently been filled with picturesque myths. Catherine de Medici did not arrive in France with artichokes, ice cream, or any of the other items that are attributed to her.2
Andrew F. Smith has disproved the modern notion that nineteenth-century Americans thought tomatoes were poisonous; they were in fact widely eaten and recipes for them appear in cookbooks. The modern reader may also be distracted by unfamiliar language. A little perseverance reveals that risshewes are what would be called rissoles today, while gyngautrey turns out to be a fish stew.3 Nevertheless, although the words sound strange they are still meaningful. The people who wrote them were not unintelligent. It is often useful to consult dictionaries that date from the time of the book to clarify puzzling instructions.
Of what use can a cookbook be to a historian or to a history teacher? There are many reasons to use them, but first a caveat: prescriptive literature always has an uneasy relationship to actuality. There are more showpiece recipes than were ever cooked. Medieval recipe collections frequently call for game, both furred and feathered, that could only have been for the tables of landowners and their fortunate guests. Swan, wild boar, sturgeon, and spices are all elite foods and flavors. Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers include long, complicated recipes for turtle soup, which was rarely cooked in ordinary kitchens. We cannot expect such sources to tell us about daily life for most people. The transmission of culinary knowledge then and for centuries to come was primarily through the senses and sense experience: the novice stood by the side of the expert, watching, smelling, tasting, carrying out techniques, and listening.
But the manuscripts and the printed books do tell us something of the life of cooks and their societies. Some tell us about skills and ambition and pride. Others speak of social responsibility—temperance, frugality, or community cohesiveness. There are books that tell us how to make much of little, how to deal with stale fish and wilting greens. Most say that we will do well to follow their advice.
There are a number of useful bibliographies to help the teacher or researcher find these books. Many have been reprinted in various forms. Furthermore, examples of most of the earliest printed books can be found on the Internet at the websites of national libraries such as Gallica for the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, scholarly collections such as Early English Books Online, and the Feeding America site at the Michigan State Library.
The best modern editions of old cookbooks present faithful images of the whole original text and may be accompanied by useful introductory material and, when necessary, a glossary. They echo the look and size of the original. The worst do not identify the edition or the source volume. They may be given a false, quaint title. In some cases publications of manuscripts rearrange the sequence of recipes according to modern ideas of how a cookbook is constructed. Since manuscript cookery and household books are usually made up of content that accumulates over time, one loses any sense of the ebb and flow of domestic interests.
Because cookbooks often bear marks of ownership, dates of use long after publication, and even comments on individual recipes, it is worth taking the trouble to look at multiple copies of the same edition. Owners sign their copies, and sometimes add notes commemorating a gift to another person. The postpublication life of some volumes can be traced via booksellers’ stickers, as in the case of a late Paris edition of Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise that was sold by a nineteenth-century Montreal bookseller.4 The catalogs of dealers in cookbooks record changing values, and in the case of manuscripts, occasionally provenance. A battered copy of an 1808 edition of Simmons’s American Cookery was bound luxuriously in gold-tooled red leather in the twentieth century, serving as an example of the changing values of old cookbooks.
There are specialist cookbooks. A Book of Fruit and Flowers (1653) and John Evelyn’s Acetaria (also 1653) on salads are examples. Food writings overlap with other writings: medical, agricultural, and architectural works often include significant sections that may be small cookbooks in themselves. Books of secrets were widespread in Europe and the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were addressed primarily to women in charge of large households, who had the responsibility of caring for the young and the sick, and often contain instructions for distilling cordials and making confectionary. Etiquette and other advice addressed to young people describe ideal behavior at ideal meals.
People buy cookbooks for many reasons: perhaps they are setting up housekeeping for the first time, or they may have become richer, or poorer. New foods arrive in their marketplace, or the shops are selling new equipment. New ideas about what constitutes a good diet lead to the avoidance of familiar foods and the acceptance of new ones.
The struggle to develop a language of cooking and eating has been long. We are fortunate to have even imperfect documentation of how people once cooked and thought about meals. In places where literacy is not the norm, even today, it is not uncommon for the first accounts of culinary practices to have been written by outsiders. These travelers’ accounts, however faulty, are precious. Early manuscript recipes are often terse enough to fit inside a fortune cookie. Nonetheless we have to make do: they are as close as we can get to the skills and attitudes of the men and women who cooked in the past. If we listen to the voices in these books we may hear more than we expect. Read closely. Variations in language reflect local dialects and speech patterns. The French term “quelquechose” turns into “kickshaw” when an English cook writes it down. Twentieth-century American community cookbooks contain every imaginable variation upon the idea and the spelling of “boeuf bourguignon.”
Written records of what had been a craft largely transmitted by spoken word and lived example are scarce before the late fourteenth century. They are usually written in the vernacular and emerge from courtly and monastic settings. It can be argued that the manuscript cookbook has never entirely disappeared, but has survived to the present in countless homes.5
In medieval Europe some culinary manuscripts, such as Le Ménagier de Paris (ca. 1394), existed in multiple copies but with the coming of print and the growth of literacy the supply and variety of cookbooks increased. By the seventeenth century a typical cookbook, whether French, English, or German, would be organized on one of several principles. Some are organized by season, others by the sequence of the meal, by ingredient, or by technique. As early as 1691, François Massialot’s Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois arranges its recipes alphabetically.6 There may be a table of contents, or an alphabetical index, although some publishers alphabetize only by the first letter. Elaborate title pages are a feature especially of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century volumes.
A few words of caution are in order. Some cookbooks stay in print for decades, slipping further and further behind real-world practices. When a cookbook goes into multiple editions the author sometimes appends new recipes at the back of the book, leaving the original text intact, as does Eliza Leslie in her Directions for Cookery (1837).7
In many parts of the world, and particularly where literacy rates for women and for the less wealthy have been low, cookbooks are rare. Even in Europe, they are rarely the prize projects of publishers. Instead, they are items that can be printed and reprinted when presses might otherwise be idle. While the first published recipes appear as early as the 1470s, there are robust cookbook-publishing traditions only in England, Germany, Italy, and France. Henry Notaker’s Printed Cookbooks in Europe 1470–1700 lists 232 different titles.8 Some volumes appeared in a single edition, others in more than fifty (including pirated editions). His bibliography also includes agricultural and medical books that include recipes.
Quite a few of the copies of books cited in Notaker’s bibliography are described as imperfect. The more medical or scientific books survive in greater numbers, probably because they were not kept in kitchens. Many editions of popular cookbooks have vanished. Some copies would have been discarded when the recipes in them became unfashionable, and others when they were simply in such poor condition as to be unusable. Andrew Pettegree, in The Book in the Renaissance, observes that vernacular publications before 1700 are rarer than those in Latin because they were more intensively used, and in many cases “used to destruction.”9
The substantial growth in culinary publishing after 1700 presents a challenge. Some books, such as Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise, change substantially over time, while other long-lived works remain largely unchanged. Roy Shipperbottom, in his edition of Elizabeth Raffald’s Experienced English Housekeeper, estimates that the book went through more than thirty editions.10 It outlived its author by more than fifty years. With the substantial growth in literacy in the eighteenth century the potential market for cookery books expanded dramatically, and publishers produced many more titles, borrowing freely from earlier works when it suited their purposes.
Cookbook authors address a variety of readers: the Parisian youth learning his trade in restaurant kitchens, the young maidservant come to Boston from a farm, the housewife with money constraints, the New York City hostess hoping to impress her guests. The writer may speak as a friend, a guide, or a stern authority. Lydia Maria Child, in her austere American Frugal Housewife (first edition 1829), which she speaks of as “this cheap little book,” addresses the reader directly with down-to-earth language: “If your husband brings home company when you are unprepared,” says she, make a rennet pudding.11 On the other hand, Sarah Josepha Hale, writing in 1839 in The Good Housekeeper, or the Way to Live Well and To Be Well While We Live combines advice for “an economical dinner” with recipes for macaroons, kisses, and sugar drops.12 It is unlikely that anyone ever cooked all the recipes in a single cookbook, but what books like this do is create expectations of what foods and what levels of complexity are appropriate in differing situations. In this sense they serve a role similar to that of etiquette books. Mrs. Cornelius calls herself, and titles her book, The Young Housekeeper’s Friend (1846).13
Cooks have always made their own recipe collections, although by the nineteenth century these handwritten collections were interspersed with recipes clipped out of newspapers and magazines, and today the collections may reside in computer files and travel over the Internet. The craft of cooking has always been best transmitted by direct experience. The young girl who learns how to cook by helping her mother and the young apprentice in a professional kitchen are able to touch and taste and hear how to cook in the most precise and direct way. In such a setting, language and measurement are secondary. The novice sees how big a cupful is, feels what the texture of pastry should be, and senses how a piece of meat smells when it is done. If illiterate, she or he acquires new recipes by word of mouth. There is evidence of this in the way the names of recipes evolve over time. What is called Lombard pie in fifteenth-century England has become lumber pie in the eighteenth century, and rice pilaf can also be known as pilloe or pillow or pellaw. The naming of recipes is often arbitrary. Nineteenth-century French recipes in the haute cuisine tradition bear the names of noble families, such as the comtes d’Uxelles; chefs, such as Carême; and battles, such as Marengo. Some recipes, like one from Monsieur Marnette’s French Pastry-cook (1656), offer a “Gammon Pastie after the Turkish mode” which is clearly culturally impossible.14 Many dishes were named to curry favor or borrow fame. Few were invented by the people whose names are invoked. In manuscripts, named recipes can indicate social and familial networks.
A printed cookbook is not the work of a single individual. The publisher and the printer, perhaps a designer, a printmaker, or a photographer take the work of a writer and change it in ways the writer may never have intended. There may be introductory material added: a preface by one person, an introduction by another, and perhaps an index made by a specialist with no understanding of culinary naming. Stephen Mennell points out the problem in his essay “Lettre d’un Pâtissier anglois et autres contributions à un polémique gastronomique du XVIIIème siècle” concerning the introduction to Les Dons de Comus (1739).15
Even the identity of the writer may be in doubt. John Farley’s London Art of Cookery is a fraud, as Fiona Lucraft has demonstrated in her essay “The London Art of Plagiarism.”16 Much of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747) was lifted from earlier works.17 Biographical details about authors are usually scanty, especially before the nineteenth century. A date of birth indicates whether a book is the work of a young person or an old one, whether they are preserving the past or inventing a future. Lydia Maria Child was twenty-seven when her Frugal Housewife was first published in 1829; Isabella Beeton published her Book of Household Management at the age of twenty-five, and was dead at twenty-eight. On the other hand Jos. Cooper, Robert May, and William Rabisha all based their claims to authority on having cooked at the long-gone courts of James I and Charles I. They would have been elderly men who followed their patrons to France during the Commonwealth.
If the author’s name did not suffice to attract buyers, the publisher lured them with titles ranging from the terse “Art of Cookery,” which was frequently used, to extensive recitals of the contents of the work. The title page of Richard Bradley’s Country Housewife (London, 1732) runs to more than one hundred and thirty words. Frontispieces, often representing abundantly equipped kitchens added allure, as did carving and table-setting diagrams.18
The look, heft, quality, and typography of these volumes tell us a lot about the intended readership. The earliest American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), is a modest little book, of a size that could be slipped into an apron pocket.19 Illustrations in cookbooks are rare, with the exception of frontispieces and table-setting diagrams. Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera (1570) is illustrated with engravings (woodcuts in later editions) depicting cooking pots, knives, spoons, and even a fork, as well as a kitchen with a mechanical spit and a scene of men making pasta.20 Marx Rumpolt’s huge Ein new Kochbuch (1581) is embellished with woodcuts, but they are recycled from earlier works. It is not until the invention of chromolithography that color finds its way into print. In his Livre de cuisine (1867) Jules Gouffé uses color to show the reader what good and bad meat looks like, as well as to depict elaborately ornamental completed dishes.
Certain books are reprinted and sometimes revised over considerable periods of time. Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise continued to be printed during the French Revolution and was still a bestseller in the early nineteenth century; it was also translated into several languages. Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery, a work whose profound debts to earlier works did not prevent it from being long-lived, was far more common than better books. It was not always the best books that traveled farthest.
One would think from reading culinary bibliographies that the literature is vast. That is true for the last century or so, but is by no means the case with the earlier years. Henry Notaker, in his excellent study, Printed Cookbooks in Europe: 1450–1700, shows that when multiple editions of a single work, including many pirated editions and not a few translations, are grouped together the figures are surprising. During the years between 1450 and 1700, he finds one cookbook each in Catalan, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese; four each in Danish and Swedish; seven in Spanish; and eight in Latin. By contrast, there are twenty works in Italian, thirty-six in French, fifty-six in German, and seventy-eight in English in the same period.21
There is no comparable study for the years after 1700, but as literacy became more widespread among both sexes the number of cookbooks grew rapidly, and more of them were aimed specifically at one gender or the other. Lynette Hunter’s seventeenth-century “Books for daily life: household, husbandry, behavior” describes the cluster of books by Gervase Markham, Hugh Plat, and Hannah Woolley that a literate Englishwoman might have used to perform her overlapping duties.22
After the American Civil War women raised money for charitable projects by organizing what are called “community cookbooks”: collections of recipes contributed by members of a particular place or organization such as a church. We have little information about how substantial the profits were. The books are remarkable though, because they were produced at a local level, usually by women with no other publishing experience, who usually worked with printers in or near their communities. The books sometimes include pictures of churches, schools, temples, and other organizations, and short histories of the organizations themselves. Many are signed, and in some twentieth-century examples handwritten recipes are replicated in the books. Every state has produced at least a few. Some have been produced by immigrant communities in the process of acclimatizing, people who arrive with skills, ceremonies, taboos, and expectations, but who cannot be sure of finding a familiar repertory of ingredients. They adapt as best they can. Their children embrace the foods of their new country, while the grandchildren sometimes want to recreate the nearly forgotten cuisine of their grandparents.
In the United Kingdom, women’s institutes produced many such community collections, for example, Gleanings from Gloucestershire Housewives; first published in 1927, a version was still in print in 1976.23 In sources such as these, change over time can be observed in a fine-grained way. British citizens living in colonies of the British Empire wrote cookbooks to help their sisters adapt to life in unfamiliar places. While the majority of space was devoted to recipes from the British Isles, there were often some chapters devoted to local foodstuffs and recipes. R. Riddell’s Indian Domestic Economy (1849), A. R. Kenny-Herbert’s Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878), and the work of American Foreign Service wives abroad, such as An American Accent in the Kitchen, published by the American Women’s Club of Pretoria and the American Diplomatic Wives of Cape Town in the 1950s are examples of this genre.24 A parallel development was the publication of a number of bilingual cookbooks for people emigrating to the United States from Germany and Scandinavia; likewise, there are a few books that are intended to facilitate communication between American women employers and their Domestics who did not speak English. In parts of the world where cookbook publishing has been nonexistent, sometimes shops in tourist destinations sell recipe pamphlets focusing on local specialties. The Bermuda Recipe Book, first published by the Warwick Branch of the Bermuda Welfare Society in 1934, and in its sixth edition in 1961, reflected a long tradition of supporting local charities with money from tourists.25
Cookbooks are highly interactive publications, and the signs of these interactions sometimes remain in the books. Bookplates and inscriptions of donors and owners can be helpful to the researcher. In manuscripts, if the attributions are abundant, a whole network of kinship, neighborhood, and domestic staff can be traced. However, one can go astray: “Mrs. Putnam’s doughnuts” in a manuscript may well have been copied from Mrs. Elizabeth Putnam’s Receipt Book, and not from a neighbor.26
Twentieth-century cookbooks emerge from the dark world of war and its aftermath. The wartime cookbooks are small and printed on bad paper. Others were compiled in situations where palatable food was only a distant dream. American prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II remembered the dishes they had eaten before the war. Colonel H. C. Fowler’s Recipes out of Bilibid was compiled after his death.27 Wilhelmina Pächter’s In Memory’s Kitchen similarly records the food memories of Jewish women in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.28 On a somewhat less dark note, the Operation Vittles Cook Book was the work of American women in Berlin during the Soviet blockade.29
Recipes appear in places other than cookbooks—in newspapers and magazines, especially those addressed to women, and on trade cards promoting products such as Hecker’s Flour, Red Star Yeast, and Liebig’s meat extracts in the later nineteenth century. Food containers continue to use their packaging to supply what could be described as a user’s manual for their products, such as the Ritz Crackers recipe for mock apple pie and the Baker Chocolate’s recipe for German chocolate cake. American cooking school teachers, including Fannie Farmer and Mrs. Rorer, helped to introduce their students and readers to branded foods and equipment by publishing pamphlets with recipes using these products. By the end of the nineteenth century these teachers were incorporating brand names into the recipes themselves, which subsequently often traveled to the pages of community cookbooks. Publishers have advertised their other books in the back of cookbooks for centuries.
The scholar or student may well be overwhelmed by the torrent of information provided by these rich and bewildering volumes. It is best to proceed in an orderly way, considering one kind of information at a time. Ingredients, the kitchen and its equipment, techniques, the presentation and eating of a meal are best understood if they are looked at separately and systematically. Only then can the cookbook make sense as a whole, and only if it is seen with comparable works of prescriptive literature, such as craft manuals and books of advice to servants and young people.
An inventory of the ingredients in a cookbook shows what the book’s author thinks might have been available to the reader. The inventory might emphasize locally produced items, or others that are rare and costly. Locally produced foods are not always eaten by the people who produce them. This is especially the case with luxury foods, such as cheeses, truffles, goose livers, and hothouse fruit, which can bring in much-needed income. Recipes using them are found not in country cookbooks, but in those written to supply wealthy urban tables.
Beyond local production, the exchange of plants and animals between the Eastern and Western hemispheres since 1492 was first described at length by Alfred W. Crosby in The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.30 But there had been important movement of plants and animals in both hemispheres long before Columbus. Salt was traded over long distances in the Bronze Age; the tomato, originally from Peru, was domesticated in Central America. Southeast Asian poultry and South Asian sugar cane were in the Mediterranean in antiquity.
Geographic points of origin may be far removed from the kitchen in time as well as space. The cook’s repertoire is limited by money, hunting rights, the seasons, religious observances and taboos, the commands of dietary systems, and changing fashions. In the country food can be fished, foraged, and hunted. What transportation systems are in place is a key factor in availability. Before the Industrial Revolution the presence of river systems brought seafood to Paris, but most country cookbooks emphasize freshwater, farmed, and migratory fish. Ocean fish was for the most part salted, smoked, or dried. Isochronic maps, which represent equivalences and differences in travel times rather than in space, are useful.
Foods may be gotten by work, by barter, or with money. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century farming treatises often include a section on food, emphasizing harvesting and preserving. In addition they usually discuss varieties of plants and animals to be raised. In some cases they include recipes for other cooking techniques as well. Knowledgeable country dwellers could forage for mushrooms, greens, hedgerow berries, birds’ eggs, and even lichen. They raised chickens, for their own use, to barter, or to sell. If they lived near salt water, seaweeds, such as laver, could enrich their diet. Many country people lived almost entirely outside the cash economy. Networks of bartering will not appear in the cookbooks, but were undoubtedly of great importance.
There may be other absences. In mid-twentieth-century cookbooks margarine may not be mentioned, even though it was routinely used as an economical substitute for butter. Beekeeping was a normal activity on country estates, but one rarely sees honey mentioned in recipes. Potatoes appear in English and German cookbooks in the eighteenth century, in France not until the nineteenth. An ingredient inventory will also reveal what is missing: Where are the maple syrup recipes in nineteenth-century New England cookbooks? When and why did the overwhelming preference for mutton over lamb turn completely around? Do we exaggerate the past importance of foods we now strongly associate with a region? Our expectations of what may be found in these volumes will often disappoint us because the myths that have grown up around cooking in past times have misled us.
Cookbooks reflect taste preferences as well as, indirectly, health anxieties. Consider the sensory qualities of the foods and how they varied over time. There are the basic flavors of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and what is now called umami. What are the flavor combinations, the smells, the look of the finished dish? What are the textures and colors; how spicy or bland would the dishes be? In the Middle Ages pungent sauces using mustard, vinegar, or verjus were the norm and brightly colored dishes were admired; in the eighteenth century translucent jellies made from calves’ feet were fashionable. The early nineteenth century saw a flurry of recipes for chutneys and spicy bottled sauces called soy or ketchup that were inspired by the world of the British Raj. In European haute cuisine pre-World War I, smooth textures and delicately seasoned ingredients were preferred.
Food anxiety appears again and again. In the Middle Ages fish, deemed cold and wet by followers of Galen, was sometimes made safer by adding sugar, which balanced the humors with dry heat. Melons, too, were thought to be dangerous because they were cold and wet, and tales were told of popes who died of eating them. Mid-nineteenth-century American cookbooks contain recipes that appeal to the dyspeptic, water-cure enthusiasts, and members of the temperance movement. The food theorist (or faddist) Sylvester Graham promoted the use of whole grains and the practice of vegetarianism. Graham breads are common in the cookbooks of this era. Among the informal public there was widespread distrust of the food supply. The chemist Friedrich Accum, publishing his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820) in English and German, alerted people to the dangers threatening their diet.31 The widespread legend in France, that butchers sold cat meat as rabbit is reflected as late as 1938, when Larousse Gastronomique published comparative photographs of cat and rabbit bones.
Another problem reflected in cookbooks was spoilage. Far from eating wonderful food at all seasons, our ancestors ate to keep ahead of spoilage, while still having enough left in their storerooms and root cellars until well into the spring, when the hens began to lay again, the cows to give milk, and green plants to grow. Cookbooks offer hopeful, frugal but often implausible directions: how to keep green peas until Christmas is a favorite in the eighteenth century. The labors of rural households were centered on getting food and keeping it in as edible a condition as possible. Even in cities the agricultural calendar ruled the cost and availability of food. Two domestic calendars that ran in opposite directions occupied everyone charged with supplying food for the household. The first was the cycle of the agricultural year, from the earliest spring green through to the late-autumn slaughtering of the pig. The second was the relentless slide into rottenness. Raspberries had to be preserved as soon as they were picked, no matter how hot the July day. Cheeses were made after the calves were born in the spring and the cows were giving abundant milk. The male calves soon appeared at table as veal. Once the cheeses were made they had to be inspected regularly until they were ripe and ready. Vegetables were pickled, fruit preserved by drying or with sugar. Apples were cut up, threaded on strings and dried to supply late winter pies of a rather unwelcome sort, or they could be stored on dry straw in the attic and eaten promptly when they began to wrinkle. Hams grew rusty in appearance; the spoilage was trimmed off, and the better part used at once. Hens stopped laying in the winter, and the housewife would try various methods of saving the last eggs of the laying season.
Before refrigeration the rate at which supplies deteriorated in rural households governed what was served at meals far more than did epicurean desires. Foods could be dried, salted, smoked, pickled, and preserved in sugar, if it was affordable. They could be kept in cold, dry attics, or below ground in root cellars, but few improved while they awaited use. In Northern Europe and much of North America it was well into the spring before new crops were ready for consumption. In the premodern world early spring could be a time of scurvy and starvation. Moreover, in medieval Europe food of animal origin was forbidden on fast days (Fridays, the eves of saints’ festivals, and the forty days of Lent), when people could not eat meat, cheese, milk, or eggs, even if such things were available. These restrictions were eased for most of Protestant Europe in the sixteenth century. When canning came into use in the early nineteenth century, first as a commercial process and later in the home, it greatly enhanced the wintertime table.
Cookbooks arranged by month show the labors of the agricultural year as clearly as do medieval calendar illuminations. The first volume of Richard Bradley’s Country Housewife and Lady’s Director follows this plan. It is in April, when veal is plentiful, that he gives a recipe for “Veal Glue, or Cake-Soup, to be carried in the Pocket”—the ancestor of the bouillon cube.32 The preserving of fruit during the summer and the late autumn pig slaughter, with the accompanying work of making sausages and hams, are aspects of agricultural labor that Europe and European immigrants to America have engaged in for more than a thousand years. In cookbooks written for landowners there is the added presence of game-birds and animals. The list of game items may include surprises. Surely Simmons is just showing off when, in her American Cookery (1796), she includes peacock in her list of birds to roast. Marx Rumpolt’s Ein new Kochbuch (1581) offers recipes for eagle, which was probably more fantasy than practice. On the other hand, it is just barely possible that Rumpolt’s aurochs recipes were used to cook those soon to-be extinct ancestors of modern cattle. In the nineteenth century relatively modest volumes contain diagrams of how domestic animals are to be butchered, while in medieval manuscripts the writers rarely mention specific cuts of meat. On the other hand, the casual suggestion in the 1938 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique that the aurochs is cooked like beef has very little credibility, since the creature had by then been extinct for two centuries.
While most foodstuffs are seasonal, the kitchen, its equipment, and the cook’s skills and tools are at hand all year around. Some cookbooks explicitly describe kitchens and their equipment; in others there are only clues. The kitchen as a separate room was not a feature of every household in the Middle Ages or early modern Europe. The equipment of and work performed in the French medieval kitchen are probably best evoked in the Ménagier manuscript from the late fourteenth century.33 The work space would have consisted of the hearth, a big pot suspended from a crane over the fire, and andirons to hold one or more spits for roasting in front of the fire. There would have been a dripping pan underneath.
By the seventeenth century kitchens in large establishments would have subsidiary work spaces: a room with a bake-oven and a cool kitchen or office, similar to the garde-manger in professional kitchens today. In very large eighteenth-century houses the kitchen might be placed in a side building of the principle structure, linked to it by a passageway, and balanced on the other side by the stables, thus removing noisy, smelly activities from the genteel life of the family. If the distance was great there might be an anteroom next to the dining room to reheat foods before they were served. In cities the kitchens might instead be on a basement level. In either case spaces for baking and for preparing dairy and confectionary goods might be near the principal kitchen. Most cooks worked in very modest spaces. A woodcut illustration in the 1817 edition of Juan Altimiras’s Nuevo arte de cocina shows twenty objects, ranging from a freestanding butcher’s block, long-handled frying pans for hearth cookery, a skimmer, and other readily recognizable pieces of the batterie de cuisine that would be normal in any European kitchen between the Middle Ages and the middle of the nineteenth century.34 At that point the evidence for specialized equipment grows exponentially, as can be seen in the well-illustrated cookbooks by Louis Eustache Audot and Eliza Acton.35 Both works include chapters on the changing array of recently invented devices for the up-to-date kitchen.
A close examination of a good cookbook, concentrating on the techniques and equipment used or implied will yield a picture of the cook’s skills and circumstances. Recipes rarely say “take a knife,” but they constantly say “cut,” “slice,” and so on. In other words, the equipment is invoked by the actions. So are the spaces: freshly-made sausages are to be placed “in the smoky corner of the hearth”; meats hung to dry out of doors in the breeze; fruit taken to the dry attic or set in glass jars in the sun, where they cooked from its heat. Preserves were covered with paper dipped in brandy, and we can sometimes see them in still life paintings. A gridiron might be hung from a bit of string on a nail pounded into the wall. There were also shelves on the walls to hold equipment and perhaps even a cookbook or two. In a small dwelling there might be but a single hearth, to warm the family as well as to cook the meals and light the workspace. The table where the family ate would serve as a work table as well. Such a kitchen might not have all the equipment in Altimiras’s woodcut.
The price of fuels was another consideration. If there are fewer roasts in French cookbooks than there are in English it is because coal was cheaper in England than in France. In the Middle Ages and even later, ovens were often built into the sides of fireplaces, but most households well into the nineteenth century and even later baked on griddles, with wafer irons, or in covered ceramic pots or “tin kitchens” of various designs. The many recipes for pancakes, flapjacks, and other little starchy foods reflect the absence of ovens, or the cost of fuel to fire them up on a regular basis. Quick dishes such as omelets and other small egg dishes provided food with a minimum of fuel. Urban householders who lacked baking facilities used the ovens of bakers in their neighborhoods. This practice is reflected in the classic slow-baked French dishes that are typically described as being à la boulangère.
Eighteenth-century cookbooks will sometimes recommend using the stewing stove, or potager. This was a block of masonry with insets in which small charcoal-fueled fires could be made. They were, ideally, placed by windows, not only for light, but to carry off the carbon monoxide fumes that the burning charcoal produced. In northern France and the German-speaking world the hearth was raised to waist level.
In the nineteenth century the coming of cast-iron ranges, originally built into the old hearths and later free-standing, brought a change in cooking techniques, though as late as the middle of the twentieth century there were cooks in rural Europe who were still cooking at the hearth. The new equipment made some cookbooks obsolete and brought substantial changes in how people cooked. This was particularly true for baking. Further changes have been rolling in ever since: gas ranges were already being used in the late nineteenth century. With electrification, which happened at very different rates in different places, all kinds of other equipment appeared in kitchens and even in dining rooms. In the twentieth century the chafing dish, the toaster, and the waffle iron were followed by the electric refrigerator. After World War II manufacturers produced many cooking gadgets, principal among them the blender and then the food processor. Each of these devices gave rise to specialized publications, many of the earliest ones published by the manufacturers of the devices. Industrialized food producers also put out small-format recipe booklets; the gelatin companies, for example, were able to use cheap color printing to win their customers. Meanwhile, metal-stamping factories were turning out inexpensive metal molds. In earlier centuries food molds were expensive pieces of equipment, hand-hammered from sheets of copper and lined with tin. When aluminum became cheap the gelatin companies offered molds and recipes alike to encourage sales. Catalogs published by suppliers for bakers, restaurants, and confectioners are dazzling evidence of the range of materials that were actually in use at a given time.
Ice houses were built in Italy in the sixteenth century, and by the end of that century there were some in France as well. Charles II built an ice house in Hyde Park after he returned from exile in France in 1660. Ice creams were by then being frozen with a mixture of ice and salt. By the eighteenth century caterers offered them among the delicacies to be served at elaborate dinners. Before the development of the ice-exporting business in the nineteenth century, they were not normally made at home.
The basic forms of pots and pans in the ordinary domestic kitchen change slowly. Only with major changes, such as that from hearth cooking to the cast iron range does the cook need new equipment. Nevertheless, the little three-footed ceramic pipkin and the iron griddle that stood over embers on a hearth are no longer useful today, and the skills that a cook needed in order to use them are forgotten. François Massialot, in Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (1725), when he tells the reader what would be required to cook a dinner suitable for the courtiers of Louis XIV, appends an equipment list.36 Similarly Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion (1887) lists at great length all the equipment a prosperous kitchen would need to create a fine Boston dinner party at any season of the year.37 Pots and pans might be made of cast iron (enameled or not), tinned copper (warnings were often given about the dangers of verdigris poisoning when the tinned lining wears away), or pewter (in the earlier years containing lead). Recipes that instruct the cook to use a silver knife to cut salad greens or stir a sauce with a silver spoon date from the days before stainless steel: iron could discolor foods, and create a disagreeable flavor. Silver spoons that are worn down on one side are evidence of a cook who cared more for her sauces than for her silverware.
Cookbooks can be useful adjuncts to inventories of household goods. A surprising number of materials are routinely implied in cookbooks but are too trivial to appear on lists or in inventories. Among these are basketwork and woodenware (also known as treen) such as bowls, spoons, mortars, and pestles. Roasts are tied up with twine; metal and wooden skewers are widely used. Paper is ubiquitous. It was used to cover delicate meats as they roasted. Small pieces were folded into square boxes in which cheese was melted. Larger sheets were cut into a circle, pleated, and used to bake soufflés. This is the origin of our white porcelain soufflé dishes with their vertically pleated sides. Spices came home from market wrapped in paper or parchment cones: these may be seen in Dutch paintings of everyday life, with the remains of lost letters still on them.
Typically cookbooks assume that their readers will use many measuring systems: by weight (pounds and kilos), by volume (by cupful), and by analogy (the size of an egg). Milk for rennet pudding should be blood warm; the coffee is roasted when it can be cracked between the teeth. Teacupsful would have been customized to each kitchen. The presence or absence of exact measurements is something of a distraction for modern readers. When most ingredients used were local ones there was a lot of variation. One miller’s corn meal or wheat flour would not be exactly like another’s. As a cook gained experience, stopping to use measures would have been an interruption. In baking and confectionary, where the repertory of materials used is smaller and where precise measuring matters more because the materials are less forgiving, measurements are indeed more exact.
The cookbooks measure time in units ranging from seconds to years. A careful analysis of times mentioned in a cookbook will give some evidence about the housewife’s day: the bread is prepared in the evening, to rise overnight to be ready for baking in the morning. Cucumbers lie in pickle for two weeks. The workflow is continuous. Lydia Maria Child advises her readers to fill “odd moments” with knitting.38 With a pair of knitting needles and some yarn, even a young person could produce stockings and other pieces of clothing at very little cost. Mrs. Child was quite right. The work of the day, the weekly chores, the annual cleanings are all there in cookbooks, waiting to be found.
An experienced cook preparing a familiar dish will make a succession of observations and decisions as he or she goes along. Is the texture of the crust flaky? Does it need a little more flour? As the dough is rolled out, how thick should it be? The nature of the apples used must be judged. Should they be tart or sweet; how thickly should they be cut, how many are needed to fill the crust; should some starch be added to thicken the filling somewhat? How should the top crust be decorated? The experienced cook will act while at the same time keeping in mind everything necessary to get a meal on the table. An inexperienced cook, lacking a better guide, turns to a cookbook. Cookbooks idealize food preparation. The apple pie recipe conjures up a smoothly functioning world into which nothing else will intrude. Although it is therefore inherently false from the beginning, we haven’t got anything better.
It is a useful exercise to use a particular book to imagine making a flowchart of a meal, from assembling the ingredients and the equipment, to the manipulations (cutting, shaping, stuffing, combining), managing the heat or the cold, assembling and perhaps decorating the finished dish, and presenting it at table. The recipe describes process. The modern recipe usually begins a list of ingredients with the quantities that are needed, listed in the order of their use. The writer usually states the number of servings that will be produced, the cooking times, and oven temperatures, and describes each stage of preparation in chronological order. There may also be a preliminary statement by the author, explaining the origin of the dish, how it can be used, and perhaps even what might be served with it. Nutritional advice is not uncommon. Recipes in older cookbooks are much looser in form and less specific in detail. The writer often assumes that the cook is already knowledgeable about his or her craft and knows how to manage a hearth or a coal stove. They demand even more of the modern reader.
As the meal ends, the dirty dishes and the debris remain. Washing up was done with soap made using leftover animal fat and with lye made with ashes from the fire. Soap was often homemade. It was supplemented with fine sand for scouring and with washing soda (sodium carbonate). Before the nineteenth century few kitchens had water piped in; it had to be drawn from wells, or, in cities like Paris, brought to the kitchen from neighborhood fountains or carried to the house by men who contracted to deliver it. Such leftovers as there were got reused within the limits of spoilage. Many recipes use them. What the residents of a household would not eat might be given to the poor; what they rejected went to the pigs and chickens.
The furnishing and arrangement of the eating space, the expected behavior of the servers and diners, the rituals of carving, and the implements used for eating are laid out in some cookbooks, and in a multitude of books of instructions to servants, to the young, and to nervous brides entering upon a lifetime of dinner-giving. Dining schedules range from two meals, one at ten in the morning and the other at four in the afternoon, in the Middle Ages, to the ambigu, served in the small hours of the morning at the eighteenth-century French court, and the Victorian “fork breakfast,” which was more like a lunch eaten standing up. Beginning in the late seventeenth century cookbooks sometimes included printed diagrams showing how dishes should be set on tables for meals served à la française, often accompanied by menus. Spoons and knives are routine in the Middle Ages, while forks gradually make their way into Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century.
The rules of who sat at table, how food was distributed and eaten, and all the little niceties that were to be observed are more the province of authorities on etiquette. When the food leaves the kitchen the cook has accomplished his or her task. In the end, however, the cook and the diner together that have performed the two necessary parts of a single act. These rich, unreliable, diverting, and moving documents challenge, surprise, and enlighten the careful reader. Speaking as they do of daily life, changing circumstances, and aspirations, they repay the effort we make to understand them.
Notes.
1. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud MS 553, 1430, cited in Thomas Austin, ed., Two Fifteenth-century Cookery-books (London: Oxford University Press, 1888), 113. I have modernized the spelling.
2. Gillian Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 318.
3. Harl. 4016, cited in Austin, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-books, 93–94.
4. Francois Menon, La nouvelle cuisinière bourgeoise (Paris: Early English Text Society, 1822).
5. Carole Lambert, ed., Du manuscrit à la table: Essais sur la cuisine au Moyen Âge et répertoire des manuscrits médiévaux contenant des recettes culinaires (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992).
6. François Massialot, Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1691).
7. Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, in its various branches, 11th ed. (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1837).
8. Henry Notaker, Printed Cookbooks in Europe, 1470–1700: A Bibliography of Early Modern Cuisine Literature (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press; Houten: Hes & De Graf Publishers, 2010).
9. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), xiv.
10. Elizabeth Raffald, Experienced English Housekeeper, with an introduction by Ray Shipperbottom (1769; repr. East Sussex: Southover Press, 1997), xiv.
11. Lydia Maria Child, American Frugal Housewife (New York: Samuel S. Wood, 1844), 62.
12. Sarah Joseph Hale, The Good Housekeeper, or the Way to Live Well and To Be Well While We Live (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Co., 1839), 85, 86, 98.
13. Mrs. [Mary Hooker] Cornelius, The Young Housekeeper’s Friend (Boston:C. Tappan, 1846).
14. Monsieur Marnette, French Pastry-cook (London: Nathaniel Brooks, 1658).
15. Stephen Mennell, Lettre d’un pâtissier anglois et autres contributions à une polémique gastronomique du XVIIIème siècle (Exeter: Exeter University, 1981); François Marin, Les Dons de Comus ou les Délices de la table (Paris: Prault, fils, 1739).
16. Fiona Lucraft, “The London Art of Plagiarism,” part 1, Petits Propos Culinaires 42 (1992): 7–24; part 2, Petits Propos Culinaires 43 (1993): 34–46.
17. Hannah Glasse, Art of Cookery (London, 1747). Reprinted by Prospect Books in 2004 as First Catch Your Hare: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
18. Richard Bradley, Country housewife and lady’s director in the management of a house, and the delights and profits of a farm (London: D. Browne and T. Woodman, 1732).
19. Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1796).
20. Bartolomeo Scappi, Opera (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1570). For an English translation, see The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570): L’arte et prudenza d’un maestro cuoco / The Art and Craft of a Master Cook, trans. Terence Scully (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008).
21. Notaker, Printed Cookbooks in Europe.
22. Lynette Hunter, “Books for Daily Life: Household, husbandry, behaviour,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, IV: 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 514–32.
23. H. Hodges and S. C. Harding, eds., Gleanings from Gloucestershire Housewives (Gloucester: Gloucestershire Federation of Women’s Institutes, 1927; repr. 1976).
24. R. Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Press, 1852); A. R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras (Madras: Higginbotham, 1885); An American Accent in the Kitchen (South Africa: American Women’s Club of Pretoria and the American Diplomatic Wives of Cape Town, date uncertain, 1950s).
25. Committee of Warwick Branch, Bermuda Welfare Society, The Bermuda Recipe Book: Five Hundred Tested and Specially Recommended Recipes (Warwick:Bermuda Welfare Society, 1934).
26. Elizabeth Putnam, Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book and young housekeeper’s assistant (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1849).
27. C. H. Fowler, Recipes Out of Bilibid (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1946).
28. Wilhelmina Pächter, In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (Northvale: J. Aronson, 1996).
29. Operation Vittles Cook Book (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1949).
30. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Praeger, 2003).
31. Friedrich Accum, Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820).
32. Bradley, Country housewife, I: 58–60.
33. Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, eds., Le Ménagier de Paris, trans. Karin Ueltschi (Paris: Livre de poche, 1994). This edition includes a translation into modern French.
34. Juan Altimiras, Nuevo arte de cocina, sacado de la escuela de la experiencia económica (1745; repr. Madrid: Imprenta de Cano, 1817).
35. Louis Eustache Audot, La Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville (Paris:L. E. A. Audot, 1818); Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845).
36. Massialot, Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, 25.
37. Maria Parloa, Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion: A Guide For All Who Would Be Good Housekeepers (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1887).
38. Child, American Frugal Housewife, 3.
By Barbara Ketcham Wheaton in "Food in Time and Place", editted by Paul Freedman,Joyce E. Chaplin,and Ken Albala, University of California Press,Oakland, California USA, 2014, excerpts pp.276-295. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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