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Recipes and Cookbooks: Food, Stories, Histories

This guide provides a sample of food and recipe cookbooks available through the Jim Dan Hill Library. It also notes other resources with related focus.

 

Why a guide about cookbooks? 

  • Food cookbooks provide collections of recipes. They can also offer guidelines or instructions for something as simple as frying your first egg, or, like the above image, "how to eat well on a budget." 

  • They may focus on meeting the needs of a given demographic group or groups, special diets, working with select ingredients, regional styles, seasonal fare, or using a particular type of cookware.

  • They can exist in realms and worlds both real and imagined, and can support human connection and understanding. Whether printed or handwritten, cookbooks and recipes can provide a way for individuals, families, and communities to preserve knowledge and provide care in both day-to-day living and across generations. 

The food and recipe cookbooks in the Jim Dan Hill Library, as well as some provided here from other digital collections within the Universities of Wisconsin holdings, represents a range of formats, styles, diets, and settings. They are available resources for users to take advantage of!

How is this useful?

Cover page. The Fairy Feast. London. Printed in the Year 1704

 

I do not use cookbooks.

Will anything here be useful for me? 

 

 

You might never care about cookbooks! But you never know. . . 
                         

  • Cookbooks can intersect with fictional worlds (such as those represented in various media) and offer both enjoyable ways to engage with those worlds as well as tools with which to analyze them.

  • Modern cookbooks often feature memoirs or other first-person accounts, high quality images, nutritional information, and may assert the sharing of data from medical studies.

  • Cookbooks may represent connections to specialized knowledges, skills, and abilities, along with people, places, perspectives, traditions, and values.

  • Modern published cookbooks may have begun as a blog or via a social media channel, or they may have a social media presence in some way. Tracing these connections may be of interest in both media and economic domains.

  • Cookbooks (or compilations of recipes) may also be published or unpublished historic or primary sources. They may provide an avenue through which we can access a select past from our location in the present. 

In addition to the actual compilations of recipes, there are cultural, social, and social scientific approaches one might take in analyzing the  role, purpose, and function of cookbooks. A selection of some of this secondary scholarship [work about a thing rather than the thing, itself] is provided as a sample of ways cookbooks might serve as an object of or resource for academic inquiry.

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