The photo is of part of my collection of cookbooks. I have collected many over the years and can’t say that I have used many of them recently. Currently, I usually get recipes from the internet. It is much easier to search and certainly much cheaper. If you noticed, there are several Southern Living cookbooks. I believe the oldest one is dated 1981. I do still use some of those cookbooks’ recipes, especially for my annual Christmas open house — which I hopefully can hold again next year after a two-year hiatus. I know I have used the Southern Living recipe for wassail, usually a beverage made with hot mulled cider and spices. However, the SL one also calls for orange juice and apricot nectar. It is delicious. Cookbooks have instructed the public how to prepare food for thousands of years. And even though I don’t purchase cookbooks any more, many people still do. Current popular chefs make a lot of money by selling their cookbooks. Let’s learn more about them.
According to Wikipedia, a cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes.
Cookbooks may be general or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food.
Recipes in cookbooks are organized in various ways: by course — appetizer, first course, main course, dessert, by main ingredient, by cooking technique, alphabetically, by region or country and so on. They may include illustrations of finished dishes and preparation steps; discussions of cooking techniques, advice on kitchen equipment, ingredients and substitutions; historical and cultural notes; and so on.
Cookbooks may be written by individual authors who may be chefs, cooking teachers or other food writers; they may be written by collectives; or they may be anonymous. They may be addressed to home cooks, to professional restaurant cooks, to institutional cooks or to more specialized audiences.
Some cookbooks are didactic, with detailed recipes addressed to beginners or people learning to cook particular dishes or cuisines; others are simple aid-memoirs — which may document the composition of a dish or even precise measurements — but not detailed techniques.
Early works
Ancient Mesopotamian recipes have been found on three Akkadian tablets, dating to about 1700 BC.
The earliest collection of recipes that has survived in Europe is “De re coquinaria,” written in Latin. An early version was first compiled sometime in the first century and has often been attributed to the Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, though this has been cast in doubt by modern research. An Apicius came to designate a book of recipes. The current text appears to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century; the first print edition is from 1483. It records a mix of ancient Greek and Roman cuisine, but with few details on preparation and cooking.
An abbreviated epitome entitled “Apici Excerpta a Vinidario” — a "pocket Apicius" by Vinidarius, "an illustrious man" — was made in the Carolingian era. In spite of its late date it represents the last manifestation of the cuisine of Antiquity.
The earliest cookbooks known in Arabic are those of Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq — an early 10th-century compendium of recipes from the 9th and 10th centuries — and al-Baghdadi in the 13th century. “Manasollasa” from India contains recipes of vegetarian and nonvegetarian cuisines, which preceded the cookbook writing history in Europe by a century. While the text is not the first among Indian books to describe fermented foods, it contains a range of cuisines based on fermentation of cereals and flours.
According to Cynthia Bertelsen's April 23, 2009 article “Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq: The Tenth-Century’s Answer to Jamie Oliver?” at gherkins tomatoes.com, here is a quote from "Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens:"
Sit at dinner tables as long as you can, and converse to your hearts' desire, for these are the bonus times of your lives.
In the words of the translator, Nawal Nasrallah, al-Warrāq’s purpose "was to 'anthologize' the celebrated Abbasid cuisine." But not only that. Like many later cookbook writers, say of the 19th century, al-Warrāq wanted to make the recipes accessible to cooks in "ordinary kitchens. So says al-Warrāq through a parable featuring a sultan's experienced cook, some male chess players and a young beginning cook.
A group of men played chess and ate at whatever house it was that the game took place. One day, the sultan’s chef asked the cook — really just a boy — at one particular house how he cooked sikbāj or beef stew soured with vinegar. But before the boy started cooking the dish, the chef asked him to show him the pot he used, so the boy showed him. The chef insisted that the boy wash the pot before starting to cook.
After repeated washings, each time the chef would sniff at the pot and demand that the boy clean it once again. Finally, and no doubt the boy began to wonder why on earth this guy was being so mean and demanding — though that is not part of the story, the chef told him to clean the Meccan soapstone pot with parsley and then it would be ready for cooking sikbāj.
When the finished dish came out — the boy cook proudly holding the fragrant, steaming stew under the noses of the men — they almost swooned at the wonderful smell, so different from what they normally ate. The sultan’s chef asked an important question, “Do you think that dishes cooked in the sultan’s kitchen are any different from the familiar ones? The ingredients used there are none other than vinegar, greens, meat, eggplant, gourd, saffron and the like. Indeed, meticulous cleanliness of the ingredients and the pot is all that it takes.”
Thus begins the first chapter, on the importance of cleanliness in the kitchen, with a pronounced condemnation of flies and their behavior. And this at a time when just about nobody in Western Europe took a bath unless it was after their death!
Chinese recipe books are known from the Tang dynasty, but most were lost. One of the earliest surviving Chinese-language cookbooks is Hu Sihui's "Yinshan Zhengyao" or “Important Principles of Food and Drink,” believed to be from 1330. Hu Sihui, Buyantu Khan's dietitian and therapist, recorded a Chinese-inflected Central Asian cuisine as eaten by the Yuan court; his recipes were adapted from foods eaten all over the Mongol Empire. ”Eumsik dimibang,” written around 1670, is the oldest Korean cookbook and the first cookbook written by a woman in East Asia.
After a long interval, the first recipe books to be compiled in Europe since Late Antiquity started to appear in the late 13th century. About a hundred are known to have survived, some fragmentary, from the age before printing. The earliest genuinely medieval recipes have been found in a Danish manuscript dating from around 1300, which in turn are copies of older texts that date back to the early 13th century or perhaps earlier.
Low and High German manuscripts are among the most numerous. Among them is “Daz buch von guter spise” or "The Book of Good Food" written c. 1350 in Würzberg and “Kuchenmeysterey” or "Kitchen Mastery," the first printed German cookbook from 1485. Two French collections are probably the most famous: “Le Viandier” or "The Provisioner" was compiled in the late 14th century by Guillaume Tirel, master chef for two French kings; and “Le Menagier de Paris” or "The Householder of Paris," a household book written by an anonymous middle-class Parisian in the 1390s. “Du fait de cuisine” is another medieval French cookbook, written in 1420.
From Southern Europe there is the 14th century Valencian manuscript “Llibre de Sent Soví” in 1324, the Catalan “Llibre de totes maneres de potatges de menjar” or "The book of all recipes of dishes" and several Italian collections, notably the Venetian mid-14th century “Libro per Cuoco” with its 135 recipes alphabetically arranged. The printed “De honesta voluptate et valetudine” or "On honourable pleasure," first published in 1475, is one of the first cookbooks based on Renaissance ideals, and though it is as much a series of moral essays as a cookbook, has been described as "the anthology that closed the book on medieval Italian cooking."
Medieval English cookbooks include “The Forme of Cury” and “Utilis Coquinario,” both written in the 14th century. “The Forme of Cury” is a cookbook authored by the chefs of Richard II. “Utilis Coquinario” is a similar cookbook though written by an unknown author. Another English manuscript in the 1390s includes the earliest recorded recipe for ravioli, even though ravioli did not originate in England.
Modern cookbooks
With the advent of the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous books were written on how to manage households and prepare food. In Holland and England competition grew between the noble families as to who could prepare the most lavish banquet. By the 1660s, cookery had progressed to an art form and good cooks were in demand. Many of them published their own books detailing their recipes in competition with their rivals. Many of these books have now been translated and are available online.
By the 19th century, the Victorian preoccupation for domestic respectability brought about the emergence of cookery writing in its modern form. In 1796, the first known American cookbook — titled “American Cookery” written by Amelia Simmons — was published in Hartford, Connecticut. Until then, the cookbooks printed and used in the thirteen colonies were British. The first modern cookery writer and compiler of recipes for the home was Eliza Acton. Her pioneering cookbook “Modern Cookery for Private Families” in 1845 was aimed at the domestic reader rather than the professional cook or chef. It was an immensely influential book, and it established the format for modern writing about cookery. The publication introduced the now-universal practice of listing the ingredients and suggested cooking times with each recipe. It included the first recipe for Brussels sprouts. Contemporary chef Delia Smith is quoted as having called Acton "the best writer of recipes in the English language." “Modern Cookery” long survived her, remaining in print until 1914 and available more recently in facsimile reprint.
The book was the result of several years of research, prompted by British publisher Longman, who had published Acton's “Poems.” Many of the recipes came from her friends. “Modern Cookery” quickly became a bestselling work, appearing in several editions and remaining a standard cookery book throughout the rest of the century. The book was immensely influential, establishing the format for modern cookery book writing, by listing the exact ingredients required for each recipe, the time needed and potential problems that might arise. It was a major departure from previous cookbooks, which were less precise.
The book was one of the first to list recipes for Eastern "chatneys," both fresh, like her "Mauritian shrimp chatney" with lemon and oil, and preserved, like her "Bengal chatney" with raisins, crab apples, garlic and ginger. It has been asserted that the book was the first to use the name "Christmas pudding," in the first edition of 1845; the dish had earlier been known simply as plum pudding. Her recipe for mincemeat as in mince pies still contained meat — she suggests ox tongue or beef sirloin — which she combined with lemons "boiled quite tender and chopped up entirely with the exception of the pips."
The book remained in print for over 50 years through most of the Victorian era, but it is Mrs. Beeton's book — first published in 1861 — which is now remembered from that period.
Isabella Beeton, was 21 years old when she started working on the book. It was initially serialized in 24 monthly instalments, in her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton's publication “The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine;” the first instalment appeared in 1859. On October 1, 1861, the installments were collected into one volume with the title “The Book of Household Management, comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort.” In its preface she wrote:
I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labor which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.
Beeton's half-sister, Lucy Smiles, was later asked about her memories of the book's development. She recalled:
Different people gave their recipes for the book. That for Baroness pudding — a suet pudding with a plethora of raisins — was given by the Baroness de Tessier who lived at Epsom. No recipe went into the book without a successful trial, and the home at Pinner was the scene of many experiments and some failures. I remember Isabella coming out of the kitchen one day, 'This won't do at all,' she said, and gave me the cake that had turned out like a biscuit. I thought it very good. It had currants in it.
Previously published as a part-work, it was first published as a book in 1861 by S. O. Beeton Publishing, 161 Bouverie Street, London, a firm founded by Samuel Beeton. The book was an immediate best-seller, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and totaling nearly two million by 1868. In 2010 a copy of the first edition of “Household Management” in "top condition" was stated to be worth more than £1,000. In 1863 a revised edition was issued.
In 1866, a year after Isabella's death, Samuel was in debt due to the collapse of Overend and Gurney, a London discount house to which he owed money. To save himself from bankruptcy, he sold the copyright to all of his publications for a little over £19,000. Of that, the rights to “Household Management” were sold to publishers Ward, Lock and Tyler for £3,250. The early editions included an obituary notice for Beeton, but the publishers insisted it be removed "allowing readers to imagine — perhaps even as late as 1915 — that some mob-capped matriarch was out there still keeping an eye on them."
Revisions to “Household Management” by its publisher have continued to the present day. The effort has kept the Beeton name in the public eye for over 125 years, although current editions are far removed from those published in Mrs. Beeton's lifetime. By 1906 the book had 2,056 pages, "exclusive of advertising," with 3,931 recipes and was "half as large again" as the previous edition.
The preface sets out the book's goal of providing "men" with such well-cooked food at home that it may compete with what they could eat "at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses". Mrs. Beeton claims that:
I have attempted to give, under the chapters devoted to cookery, an intelligible arrangement to every recipe, a list of the ingredients, a plain statement of the mode of preparing each dish and a careful estimate of its cost, the number of people for whom it is sufficient and the time when it is seasonable.
She explains that she was thus attempting to make the basics of cookery "intelligible" to any "housewife."
The first chapter sets the tone of the book with a quotation from the Book of Proverbs, and in early editions cites also The Vicar of Wakefield with:
The modest virgin, the prudent wife and the careful matron are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue.
The book thus advocates early rising, cleanliness, frugality, good temper and the wisdom of interviewing servants rather than relying on written references.
Cookery is introduced with words about "the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilization," with a mention of man "in his primitive state, [living] upon roots and the fruits of the earth," rising to become in turn "a hunter and a fisher," then a "herdsman" and finally "the comfortable condition of a farmer." It is granted that "the fruits of the earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea are still the only food of mankind", but that:
[T]hese are so prepared, improved and dressed by skill and ingenuity, that they are the means of immeasurably extending the boundaries of human enjoyments.
The text then swiftly passes to a description of simple measures like a table-spoonful, and the duties of servants.
The whole of the rest of the book is taken up with instructions for cooking, with an introduction in each chapter to the type of food it describes. The first of these, on soups, begins "Lean, juicy beef, mutton and veal, form the basis of all good soups; therefore, it is advisable to procure those pieces which afford the richest succulence, and such as are fresh-killed."
In 1885 the “Virginia Cookery Book” was published by Mary Stuart Smith. In 1896 the American cook Fannie Farmer (1857–1915) published “The Boston Cooking School Cookbook” which contained some 1,849 recipes.
Types of cookbooks
Cookbooks that serve as basic kitchen references — sometimes known as "kitchen bibles" — began to appear in the early modern period. They provided not just recipes but overall instruction for both kitchen technique and household management. Such books were written primarily for housewives and occasionally domestic servants as opposed to professional cooks, and at times, books such as “The Joy of Cooking” (USA), “La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange” (France), “The Art of Cookery” (UK, USA), “Il cucchiaio d'argento” (Italy) and “A Gift to Young Housewives” (Russia) have served as references of record for national cuisines.
Cookbooks also tell stories of the writers themselves and reflect upon the era in which they are written. They often reveal notions of social, political, environmental or economic contexts. For example, during the era of industrialization, convenience foods were brought into many households and were integrated and present in cookbooks written in this time. Related to this class are instructional cookbooks, which combine recipes with in-depth, step-by-step recipes to teach beginning cooks basic concepts and techniques. In vernacular literature, people may collect traditional recipes in family cookbooks.
While western cookbooks usually group recipes for main courses by the main ingredient of the dishes, Japanese cookbooks usually group them by cooking techniques e.g., fried foods, steamed foods and grilled foods. Both styles of cookbook have additional recipe groupings such as soups or sweets.
International and ethnic cookbooks
International and ethnic cookbooks fall into two categories: the kitchen references of other cultures translated into other languages and books translating the recipes of another culture into the languages, techniques and ingredients of a new audience. The latter style often doubles as a sort of culinary travelogue, giving background and context to a recipe that the first type of book would assume its audience is already familiar with. Popular Puerto Rican cookbook, “Cocina Criolla,” written by Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, includes recipes that are typically of traditional Puerto Rican cuisine such as mofongo and pasteles. Her cookbook was not only important to Puerto Ricans, but also very popular in the United States where her original cookbook has since been published in several editions, including English versions. These include “The Art of Caribbean Cookery” Doubleday 1957, “Puerto Rican Cookery” Pelican Publishing 1983 and “Juntos en la Cocina” co-authored with her husband, Luis F. Valldejuli - Pelican Publishing 1986.
Professional cookbooks
Professional cookbooks are designed for the use of working chefs and culinary students and sometimes double as textbooks for culinary schools. Such books deal not only in recipes and techniques, but often service and kitchen workflow matters. Many such books deal in substantially larger quantities than home cookbooks, such as making sauces by the liter or preparing dishes for large numbers of people in a catering setting. While the most famous of such books today are books like “Le guide culinaire” by Auguste Escoffier or “The Professional Chef” by the Culinary Institute of America, such books go at least back to medieval times, represented then by works such as Taillevent's “Viandier” and Chiquart d'Amiço's “Du fait de cuisine.”
Single-subject cookbooks
Single-subject books — usually dealing with a specific ingredient, technique, class of dishes or target group e.g., for kids — are quite common as well. Jack Monroe, for example, features low budget recipes. Some imprints such as Chronicle Books have specialized in this sort of book, with books on dishes like curries, pizza and simplified ethnic food. Popular subjects for narrow-subject books on technique include grilling/barbecue, baking, outdoor cooking and even recipe cloning —copying commercial recipes where the original is a trade secret.
Community cookbooks
Community cookbooks — also known as compiled, regional, charitable and fund-raising cookbooks — are a unique genre of culinary literature. Community cookbooks focus on home cooking, often documenting regional, ethnic, family and societal traditions, as well as local history. Sondra Gotlieb, for example, wrote her cookbooks on Canadian food culture by visiting people and homes by region. She gathered recipes, observed the foodways and observed the people and their traditions of each region by being in their own homes. Gotlieb did this so that she could put together a comprehensive cookbook based on the communities and individuals that make up Canada. Gooseberry Patch has been publishing community-style cookbooks since 1992 and built their brand on this community.
Community cookbooks have sometimes been created to offer a counter-narrative of historical events or sustain a community through difficult times. “The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro,” published in 1958 by the National Council of Negro Women, includes recipes that illuminate histories of Black resistance, including "Nat Turner Crackling Bread." The 1976 “People's Philadelphia Cookbook,” published by grassroots organization The People's Fund, includes recipes from members of the Black Panther Party, The United Farm Workers and the Gay Activist Alliance of Philadelphia. For “In Memory's Kitchen,” written in the 1940s by Jewish women interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, women drew on their memories to contribute recipes.
Chefs
Cookbooks can also document the food of a specific chef, particularly in conjunction with a cooking show or restaurant. Many of these books — especially those written by or for a well-established cook with a long-running TV show or popular restaurant — become part of an extended series of books that can be released over the course of many years. Popular chef-authors throughout history include people such as Delia Smith, Julia Child, James Beard, Nigella Lawson, Edouard de Pomiane, Jeff Smith, Emeril Lagasse, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Katsuyo Kobayashi and possibly even Apicius — the semi-pseudonymous author of the Roman cookbook De re coquinaria — who shared a name with at least one other famous food figure of the ancient world.
Collections and collectors
Several libraries have extensive collections of cookbooks.
- Harvard's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America has a collection of 20,000 cookbooks and other books on food, including the earliest American cookbook and the personal collections and papers of Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher and the authors of “The Joy of Cooking.”
- New York University's Fales Library includes a Food and Cookery Collection of over 15,000 books, including the personal libraries of James Beard, Cecily Brownstone, and Dalia Carmel.
- The Brotherton Library at University of Leeds holds a Designated Cookery Collection of over 8,000 books and 75 manuscripts, including the personal collections of Blanche Leigh, John Preston and Michael Bateman.
Some individuals are notable for their collections of cookbooks, or their scholarly interest therein. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, an American critic in London from the 1880s, was an early writer on the subject, and has recently been called "one of the most well-known cookbook collectors in the world." Much of her collection eventually went to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress or LOC. Held alongside hers are the thousands of gastronomic volumes donated by food chemist Katherine Bitting; their collections were evaluated in tandem in “Two Loaf-Givers” by one of the LOC's curators; a digital version is available.
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