The Cookbook as History

Over the holidays we all eat quite a bit so people might be interested in knowing that there is an Esther B. Aresty Collection of Rare Books on the Culinary Arts over at the University of Pennsylvania. Or you might just want to read through Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theopano (Palgrave, 2002). She looks at cookbooks as collective memory and their use as a keeper of lineage and friendship, as women passed around recipes and passed cookbooks down generations or from relative to relative or friend to friend, and how cookbooks were indicators of class and social mobility. Really interesting stuff.