Cookbooks

Weekly gatherings around the communion table, church dinners, harvest thanksgiving services and lamington drives were essential to Churches of Christ in Australia in the second half of the 20th century. The community cookbooks that were created in this food-rich environment reflect their particular theological, moral and social context. This article examines the material evidence of five cookbooks produced by the Bayswater Church of Christ between 1962 and 1990, reading them anew for what they reveal about both social bonds and gender roles in changing times and, in particular, for their unique role as women’s religious literature. They are presented here as religious artefacts and empirical evidence for further study. Arguably, their authors’ inclusion of many verses and poems set these community church cookbooks apart from similar secular offerings of the time.

In cookbooks dedicated to vegan Black Diaspora cuisine, Chef Bryant Terry abides by a mantra: “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end with the political.” This review explores Terry's recent cookbooks (Vegan Soul Kitchen, Inspired Vegan, and Afro-Vegan) with particular attention to how this mantra informs their writing, framing, and audience. In the long tradition of Black American chef-authors, Terry combines personal reflection with social and political analysis. This review situates Terry's work in historical and contemporary context.  In closing, I offer potential directions for teaching with Terry's work and for research. | Journal Reference: Food and Foodways, 23:127–140, 2015

Mrs W.E. Kinsey's "The 'Mems' Own Cookery Book" published in 1920 gives insights to the conditions of colonial cooking in Malaya, explores the state of colonial meals and the skills of local cooks, and provides insights to adaptations of colonial meals and recipes of Malayan food consumed by expatriate families. A brief profile of this talented housewife, her a civil-servant husband based in Malaya and his family is included

This is a master dissertation developed at the University of Northampton, United Kingdom, in 2011. It intends to investigate the origins on the connections between women and the consumption of sugar. It is known that women played a central role on the domestic ritual of tea drinking, which was surrounded by the consumption of sugar. But why, throughout the centuries, words such “sugar” and “sweet” were naturally seen as belonging to the feminine gender?  Although women had for centuries been involved in the transformation of sugar into edible sweetness through a huge amount of domestic work, why did fantasizing connections between sugar and woman become culturally solidified? It looked to me that there was a conflict of social interests pushing the connection between femininity and sweetness into a dual set of meanings: on the one hand, as realised in male writings, women are fancifully connected to sugar, either in a sense of sensuality or fragility; on the other, as observed in the women’s own material, sweetness is nothing more than the demonstration of skills through exhaustive domestic work. This paper also explores the importance and the publication of cookbooks by women during the Early Modern age.

What is a food narrative? How is it used in the construction processes of regional cuisines? What kind of themes are intertwined, discussed and associated with the dishes that root them to a certain area? These questions are focused on in my ongoing study of regional cuisines. This paper represents one section of my study and concentrates on the paratexts and food stories connected with regional cookbooks. The objective of this paper is to outline the nature of paratexts and food stories in gastronomic writing as well as highlight themes for further exploration. The province of Central Finland is my sample area, and my data corpus consists of three cookbooks from 1980 to 2008. Comparing these three books shows us the kind of narratives that have been considered essential in representing local cuisine as well as the way the nature of the textualization of regional cookbooks has changed during the past 40 years. 

Keywords: narratives, regional cuisine, textualization, food stories, cookbooks

In 1932 the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published La cucina futurista, provoking the public with his "crusade against pasta" and promise to expand minds and publics with his wildly unusual recipes. Though Marinetti's debt to past cookbooks has been acknowledged, most modern readers have characterized the text as a successful but minor example of a late Futurist avant-garde foray into the sober and codified world of nineteenth century cooking. Yet from its inception, the Italian cookbok has in fact figured itself as a nuanced and potent political tool, used first in the early modern Italian court to instigate movement up the hierarchy, and later as the peninsula tried to become a cohesive whole after the Risorgimento. This article explores Marinetti's cookbook in light of the more complex historical tradition and political valences of the genre, demonstrating the serious intentions of the apparently insubstantial text.

Communism, as defined as an ideology, is a socio-economic system, that existed, in some practice from, 1848-1991, ending with the fall of the Soviet Union. The goal of this system is an equal ownership of production among the masses and the abolishment of wealth, class and above all else, the state. As it was practiced as a governing body, it encompassed all facets of life beyond the ownership of production, bleeding into family life, gender issues and for the purpose of this paper, cuisine.
This paper serves to investigate two main research veins. First, to define ‘Soviet’ cuisine and how the propaganda cookbook, the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food played an integral role in this definition, and second to examine the long reaching effects in Poland of Mikoyan’s policies, in order to fulfill the ideals set by this cookbook and others like it.

Examines the impetus for cooking classes and cookbooks in Malaya, based on the changes noted during this cookbook's published lives prior to and after the  World War II period. The lives of the YWCA Cookbook's editors are also studied. Unpublished paper

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the impact of global celebrity chefs and their discourse about food on the genre of cookbooks in Slovenia. Focusing this discourse study on cookbook topics only, the analysis demonstrates the relationship between the aspirations of local celebrity chefs for the food culture represented globally by global celebrity chefs, such as Oliver, and the necessity for a local construction of specific tastes. While the central genre of TV celebrity chefs remains TV cooking shows, their businesses include a number of side products, such as cookbooks, which can be seen as recontexualizations of TV food discourse. Hence, despite this study being limited to analysis of cookbooks only, it can be claimed that the findings extend to other genres. The analysis shows that local chefs aspire to follow current trends, such as an emphasis on the local and sustainable production of food as well as enjoyment and pleasure in the form of a postmodern hybrid genre, while on the other hand, they strive to include topics that will resonate locally as they aim to represent themselves as the "new middle class". Such an analysis brings new insights into the relationship between discourse and globalization as well as discourse and food.

Part of Cornell Department of Architecture graduate student seminar Gastro•porn, a class-curated digital exhibition launched in May 2015. The full exhibition available online as funded and hosted by Cornell's College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (see the attached links to the entire exhibition as well as my essay where, in the latter, you will find links to the videos referenced in the article text available for download here).

This paper explores the emergence and reconfigurations of “the cooking boy” on the Danish food scene. This will be done through readings of children’s cookbooks from 1975 till today. The readings will explore how cooking has been made legitimate for boys and integrated in the discourses of boys’ lives and boys’ universes. The article identifies three recurrent tendencies of “boying” cooking in the material, namely the cooking boy as the big brother, boys’ cooking in the wilderness and cooking and bonding with dad. The article concludes that cooking – a new and traditionally feminine space and practices – has been open to boys, but gendered distinctions between masculine and feminine cooking are still a central part of the children’s cookbook at present.

In the years of the Economic Miracle in Italy (1958–63), popular magazines, advertisements, and cookbooks
mostly portrayed adult women as housewives and mothers, whose primary responsibility was feeding the family. Images
of women in the kitchen were ubiquitous in the visual culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which often represented
them as caught between tradition and modernity. Trendy magazine columns, images printed on the packages displayed in
supermarkets or neighborhood stores, as well as traditional social habits asked women to allow an external model to
shape their behavior in the domestic realm. Creativity was hardly presented as a quality of the ideal woman before a
seminal marketing campaign promoted by Barilla in 1964. However, female consumers were not always passive
followers of the guidelines delineated by others. Looking at the use of the historic cookbooks owned by the Biblioteca
Gastronomica Academia Barilla in Parma, Italy, gives us a hint of the independence with which at least some female
consumers related to standardized messages, partially resisting them even before gender equality become an open battle
in the mid-1960s. This resistance reflects religious, political and social values, which competed with the rise of
consumerism.
Keywords: Modern Italy, Industrial Food, Recipe Books, Gender Identity, Resistance, Visual Culture

This article deals with how the Georgian cuisine is described and depicted in seventeenth different cookbooks. The main question asked in the paper is if there is a difference between how Georgia's cuisine is depicted in cookbooks written by Georgians and foreigners. Before the survey Georgia's geographical location will be presented followed by a section about the sources and source criticism. After the survey the article ends with a closing discussion about the results where the authors own impressions of the nation's cuisine is included.

This paper aims to connect Franco-Italian and Anglo-American historiographies on the history of food thanks to a focus on sociability in a cross-cultural context. As an original case-study, eighteenth century Vienna allows us to develop an ecological approach to food, diet and food supply, contrasting interactions between the social actors and their intellectual, natural, economic, social and cultural environments. The history of food is an intellectual history and a history of science of the German Enlightenment, since studying cookbooks fits in with the history of books and statistics. The history of Viennese food also highlights the vibrant urban economy of supply as a key-element to understand the gentrification of the city and the reconfiguration of its markets as places of sociability. Contrary to both the London and Parisian models, the presence in Vienna of numerous foreigners also contributed to the emergence of taverns and coffeehouses as selective and private social places allowing moral
transgression and the strengthening of social bonds within the different groups of newcomers, making up the new social elite of the city. Finally, the Viennese history of food is also a history of power; the circulation of food between social actors provides historians with a better understanding of the nature of social bonding and the different possible ways to strengthen, maintain, adjust or contest it.

In both the visual and verbal media of early modern Europe, a number of new genres of food representation emerged. In painting and printed images, the still-life and the genre scene developed as distinct genres of visual representation after the late sixteenth century. In the realm of written texts, innovation in genres such as the cookbook and early or proto-gastronomic writing developed somewhat later, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Food was central to these new genres. They were also works which sought to represent food and its consumption realistically, rather than works in which food served primarily as a symbol for something else. This chapter examines the emergence of these new, realist genres of food representations from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Numerosas académicas y académicos han sostenido que el libro de cocina puede ser leído como literatura, destacando la función imaginativa de estos textos por encima de su dimensión práctica. Sin embargo, afirmar el valor literario de los libros de cocina con base en esta distinción corre el riesgo de reinscribir la idea de que nuestra atención crítica debe orientarse hacia lo abstracto y lo intelectual,
más que a lo concreto o corpóreo. Este artículo busca responder a este problema con una recuperación del carácter práctico de la receta, pues así se completa un proceso en el que el cuerpo está implicado en la escritura, y la lectura regresa al dominio del cuerpo. Pensar en la convivencia de cuentos y recetas en Christmas Days de Jeanette Winterson (2016) me permitirá considerar este tema desde dos perspectivas. Primero, sostengo que en Christmas Days las recetas son el principal marco narrativo de la colección, invirtiendo así el esquema más habitual, en el que las recetas se insertan en un relato. En segundo lugar, explico cómo la escritura gastronómica se definió en un primer momento como distinta de las recetas, pero los libros de cocina que adoptan elementos gastronómicos desestabilizan la distinción entre apreciación estética y reproducción mecánica, y las marcas de género implícitas en ella. El libro de cocina, en especial si refiere a una festividad que conmemora una encarnación, busca llegar no sólo a la mente de quien lee, sino también a sus manos y a su paladar.

Culinary traditions have played an integral role in the Jewish religion from its very beginning. Families have continually passed down these traditions from one generation to the next as a means to preserve Jewish culture as well as to maintain their Jewish identity. The authors propose that one of the methods of preserving and transmitting these culinary traditions, traditions clearly rooted in oral tradition, has been through the cookbook. While the written cookbook continues to be popular and marketable, traditional cookbook contents are becoming increasingly available online. In saving recipes for future generations, cookbooks preserve religious, cultural, and traditional elements of Jewish life. As important as it is for Jewish libraries to consider the value of cookbooks in preserving Judaism, non-Jewish libraries, from academic to public, and from K-12 to special, can also share in this mission. Passing cookbooks down through genera- tions not only strengthens culinary cuisin...

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking a...

Three women, three choices: Custodia Leopoldina de Oliveira (1835-1889), Anna Henriqueta de Albuquerque Pinheiro (1871-1950), and Barbara do Amaral Camargo Penteado (1875-1963). Each author, in her own fashion, unveiled ¿ through private feminine writing ¿ the universe of cooking. The recipes¿ lexicon indicates the preparing techniques employed, the modernization of the household appliances and house spaces, the available ingredients at the period studied, the perpetuations and discontinuities of the dishes and of the home life. Based on the food recipes, source and object of the study, we will attempt to comprehend in which way the fooding habits have been cemented through time in a given social space. The reading and the analysis of such documents bring to light details about the family life, the economic, cultural, and social dynamics of the coffee farmers elite in the period between 1860 and 1940, reinforcing the hypothesis that the feeding habits used to operate as an instrument for the creation and maintenance of friendship bonds, as well as a social belonging vehicle.

The cookbooks of The Stork Cookery Service were established in the UK in 1939 to educate and inform readers on how to prepare food despite rationing restrictions. Given the role of the kitchen as the quintessential site of home making and consumerism, the cookbook offers a unique perspective on how food was purchased and prepared and helped shape the identity of its readers. My doctoral research so far has examined the relationship between text and illustration in cookbooks and how well recipes have been communicated. The Stork cookbooks offer an insight into how a leading manufacturer re-introduced a brand that was absent during the war. The change in social expectations and aspirations dictated the content of their recipes through text and illustration after food rationing ended.
Location: University of Portsmouth
Event Date: Apr 1, 2015
Organization: Social History Society
Conference End Date: Apr 2, 2015
Conference Start Date: Mar 31, 2015