Part 2: Cookbooks

Cookbooks

Fannie Famer’s cookbook has lived for over a century, and many other cookbooks have become classic among American chefs and food lovers. Why are cookbooks so popular? In the U.S., recipes collections of all kinds are published and sold in great numbers despite the large availability of recipes on the Internet. As a matter of fact, many bloggers and website authors adopt many cookbook’s stylistic elements, especially the way in which instructions are delivered (even when this happens through videos). At the same time, not so many food lovers have the time, the opportunity, or the desire to cook at home, despite their interest in all things culinary and the great expenses incurred in to renovate kitchens or to buy appliances and tools. So, how can the commercial success of cookbooks be explained?

Obviously, many food enthusiasts like to read them, looking at the pictures, enjoying the texts, and creating imaginary foodscapes that can offer as much joy and entertainment as actual cooking. At times, readers delve into it to acquire more culinary knowledge, out of pure culinary interest. Others buy cookbooks because their authors, especially when it comes to celebrity chefs or TV personalities. In fact, publishing and promoting cookbooks is an essential part of the marketing and PR work for many food celebrities, and an important source of revenue.

Clearly, there is more to cookbooks than meet the eye. Besides their recreational value and their practical function, cookbooks can also help us understand various aspects of material and social life of the cultures and the communities from which they originate. Recipes and other kinds of directions and suggestions, ranging from the technical to the practical – including explanations about ingredients and the origins and uses of dishes - can tell us a lot about the approach to food and food preparation in a culture. In the U.S., for instance, recipes tend to be very precise about the description of the ingredients, their procurement, and the acceptable substitutions, as well as the necessary quantities for each ingredient and the directions for the preparation. Recipes in cookbooks from Southern Europe instead still tend to be much more vague about these features. In many Italian recipes, for instance, you are likely to find the indication “q.b.” (“quanto basta”), that is “as much as it is needed”, after certain ingredients, implying that the cook, usually experienced, would have known what to do. Also, many practical steps are skipped or given for granted. Of course, that is changing, as fewer people learn how to cook through practice in their family kitchen, and need external guidance from media.

This approach implied the intergenerational transmission of culinary knowledge, usually among women, which took place in the kitchen and in the practice of daily cooking. In that context, cookbooks were not supposed to teach how to cook, but only how to expand one’s repertory by adding new recipes However, in recent year, cookbooks have responded to profound social changes, including the growing number of women in the work force that do not have time to transmit their culinary skills to the new generations, and the widespread perception that the kitchen can be a place of exploitation for women - although many are now appreciating it as a safe space for self expression. Furthermore, increasing numbers of men are cooking for passion or for necessity. As a result, recipes have become much more didactic and descriptive, making up for the possible lack of experience in many users.

It is important to remember that not all cookbooks are produced by commercial publishers. For instance, in the U.S. there is a strong tradition of community cookbooks, through which members of a social or cultural group share their culinary knowledge among themselves and with outsiders. To do so, they transfer recipes from the oral transmission and practical experience to the written page in order to create objects that can be given as a gift or sold, often to raise money or awareness for projects of relevance to the community itself. In other instances, cultural organization and public institutions produce cookbooks to highlight the material culture of a community, a region, or a whole country.

A community cookbook (Source: http://cookfoodeveryday.blogspot.com/ Links to an external site.)

Cookbooks do not limit themselves to reflect a culinary world, but they actually interact with their readers, defining the reality that they are supposed to explain and the cultural interpretations readers might generate about it. From this point of view, recipes and cookbooks play a relevant role in the establishment and the perception of food-related social customs. For example, they can identify a set of practices and concepts as belonging to an autonomous culinary tradition, turning it into something that readers then perceive as established and already existing, when in fact it may be an interpretation by the cookbook author. A few years ago American cookbooks (and chefs) mentioned or described “Italian Northern Cuisine,” a definition referring to any culinary tradition from Italy that differed from the Italian-American customs, somehow identified as Southern. Despite Italians always found the concept of “Italian Northern Cuisine” quite vague, due to the vast variety of local regional traditions in that area, the label was successful in the U.S. market, from restaurants to food products. To use another U.S. example, is gumbo a representative of Creole, Cajun, or Louisiana cuisine? These designations are not neutral, because they can reinforce the perception of different cultural worlds in the same area, or instead erase those differences by referring mostly to a geographical definition.

In some countries, cookbooks can participate in the definition of national identities using food as a tool. Authors can select some dishes and give them status of “national dishes,” or try to modernize local culinary culture to better reflect ideas of progress and development. For instance, the first book that contributed to define a national cuisine for the Italian bourgeoisie was La scienza in cucina e l’arte del mangiar bene (Science in the kitchen and the art of good eating), published by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891. Italy had become a unified country only in 1861, and many people who found themselves within their borders did not necessarily recognize themselves as “Italians.” Despite the fact that he was most familiar with the cuisines of Tuscany, Emilia, and Romagna, Artusi included recipes from all different areas of Italy, single-handedly creating a nation-wide Italian vocabulary for food and cooking.

Pellegrino Artusi’s The Science in the Kitchen, one of the first cookbooks after the unification of Italy (source: http://shootingparrots.co.uk/2013/07/17/a-is-for-pellegrino-artusi Links to an external site.)

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has argued that in recent decades cookbooks produced in India for the internal market have reflected the cultural dialogue that has been taking place between members of similar social classes from different ethnic backgrounds, trying to build a common language to interpret and interact with changing realities. Sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has discussed the 1913 Bons Plats de France: cuisine régionale (Good dishes of France: regional cuisine) by Pampille (Marthe Allard Daudet) as an example of how national cuisines are built by choosing and giving new status to specialties from different regions within a country. Igor Cusak has pointed to cookbooks from some African countries as products of the efforts from the local government to turn the food into a tourist attraction, creating a “national” cuisine in the attempt.

Cookbooks and recipes meant to introduce foreign culinary traditions also offer interesting elements of reflection. Curiosity for all things exotic has sustained a certain interest in the so-called “ethnic” cuisines, constituting what folklorist Lucy Long has defined as “exploratory eating” or, better, “culinary tourism,” which “utilizing the sense of taste, smell, touch, and vision, offers a deeper, more integrated level of experiencing the Other. It engages one’s physical being, not simply as an observer but as a participant as well”. This form of culinary tourism, which allows readers to momentarily

“travel” to far-away lands without leaving their everyday space, is widely expressed in cookbooks that try to present foreign foodways in terms of culture, customs, techniques, ingredients, and dishes that can be reproduced in any kitchen. However, the attitude towards the “ethnic” cuisines raises plenty of questions about our relationship with otherness: is it the outcome of a real interest in different cultures, or is it rather another more modern and discreet form of exploitation and consumption? The fact that most frequently authors of cookbooks about “ethnic” culinary traditions limits themselves to vague acknowledgements about the people from whom they learned the recipes or by whom they were taught, has been often pointed out as a form on neo-colonialist exploitation. After all, these first-world authors use copyright to protect what they have written about the work and the practices of communities that often get no recognition or financial compensation. (Source:http://www.chire.fr/A-134415-les-bons-plats-de-france-cuisine-regionale.aspx Links to an external site.)

Also when authors and targeted audiences belong to the same culinary culture, a variety of factors influence choices of recipes, language, and representations. In the case of celebrity chefs, cookbooks (and now websites and blogs) may aim to create public personas that are the result of the collaboration between authors, ghostwriters, marketing experts, PR professionals, and media specialists. The mediation is even more relevant when cookbooks main intent is to introduce the authors’ culture to outsiders, like in the case of Marcella Hazan for Italian cooking, Claudia Roden for Sephardic Jewish cuisine, or Kem Hom for Chinese culinary arts. These cookbooks contain frequent autobiographical elements that position their authors as “authentic” insiders and, as a consequence, authoritative sources. Moreover, authors tend to present their culinary traditions as they have experienced it. It is evident that elements of class and gender are likely to weigh enormously in the approach and even in the choices of dishes.

In conclusion, cookbooks are far from being static objects. They rather engage readers, authors, and whole communities in negotiations about what counts as important, as representative and, in certain cases, as “authentic.”

If you are interesting in the topic of food writing, sign up for WRITING AMERICAN FOOD, our FREE 5-week course dedicated to the life and work of U.S. food writing giants Judith Jones, Craig Claiborne, MFK Fisher, Clementine Paddleford, and Michael Batterberry and their work, from restaurant criticism to cookbooks and magazines.

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Links to an external site.