What Cookbooks Reveal About American Culture

Cookbooks:- The first U.S. cookbook was published in 1796, and since then, these treatises have provided insight into different eras in American history.

“They tell us about meals. The concept of meals, how many meals a day that people expect to eat? What do they expect to have in those meals?” says Megan Elias, director of food studies programs at Boston University.

Cookbooks also reveal what foods were available during the period the books were written. But cookbooks don’t just tell us about food, according to Elias, who is also the author of “Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture.” They provide information about equipment and technology.

“What are the objects that are necessary to make the things and what exists? So, are you being asked to do something over an open fire or are you being asked to use an electric stove? Is it something that can be done in the microwave?” Elias says. “If you see a lot of recipes for things that are preserved for pickles, you know that you're looking at a time without refrigeration.”

Early cookbooks were also lifestyle guides.

“They started out in the 19th century, actually as household manuals. So, there's some recipes for food, but it could be recipes for a cleaning solvent or what to do when your child has been poisoned, how to clean, how to get stains out,” says Amy Bentley, a food historian at New York University. “So they started as these larger household manuals with recipes in them, and then gradually came to be recipe books on their own.”

Amelia Simmons published the first cookbook, “American Cookery” in 1796. In it, she wrote, “This treatise is calculated for the improvement of the rising generation of Females in America.”

Cookbooks became more diversified and regional after the Civil War, according to Elias. Southern writers, and some Northern writers, began publishing cookbooks in an attempt to memorialize, and idealize, the American South.

“The idea is to sell a beautiful version of the old South that will kind of heal over the wounds of the Civil War rather than dealing with the problems that caused the Civil War to begin with,” Elias says. “They're really kind of unpleasant to read, for the most part, because they tend to stereotype and make a mockery of Black cooks, rather than really recognize their ingenuity and their skill and their talent and their intellect. … They became very successful, they really helped to establish a sense of what southern hospitality was.”

Community cookbooks, compiled by more than one person, often as a fundraiser or for charity, ultimately provide insight into what middle class Americans were eating at a given time, as well as a statement about neighborhoods and groups.

“There are recipes that you could cook from yes, but they also have this larger symbolic value of demonstrating a community coming together,” Bentley says, “and having a common document that demonstrates, you know, that we are a congregation, or we are a school.”

In the late 1860s, many recipes started paying more attention to food bacteria concerns and healthy-seeming foods, reflecting society’s growing knowledge of both subjects.

Cookbooks show that meal planning changed in the 1930s once refrigerators became more commonplace in American homes.

Cookbooks, however, stop short of being a comprehensive reflection of society.

“You really have to think about the publishing world and who it is, where it is, and what it wants, right?” Elias says. “So, the publishing world wants to make money. The publishing world doesn't necessarily have the goal of representing the truth of Americans who made it. It tends to be upper middle class, white, Northeastern.”

But publishing’s control of the narrative has loosened. Social media and food blogs have led to the democratization of conversations around food, recipes and cooking, giving consumers more power.

“If you look at the comments on food blogs and on any kind of recipe site, you really get to see what people are cooking, and what they think of how they're cooking, and how they think of themselves as experts,” Elias says. “And that is just a really thrilling new phenomenon around food conversations in the world.”

But that doesn’t mean that the golden age of cookbooks is over.

“Cookbooks are still one of the most popular books out there and are purchased regularly,” Bentley says. “They're very good to give as gifts. They're very, very popular because they're sort of neutral. And everyone loves a cookbook, especially with beautiful pages.” VOA/SP