In November 2024, the New York Times published "The 25 Most Influential Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years: Chefs, writers, editors and a bookseller gathered to debate — and decide — which titles have most changed the way we cook and eat." Part of the introduction reads: "A cookbook can be a work of cultural anthropology, a historical record, an instruction manual and a vehicle for armchair travel. But what makes a cookbook great?" Many of those 25 titles have also been written about. They have been the subject of critical reviews, of analyses, of memory, and have served as inspiration for creative forms of writing. A selection of resources is available, below, as is a stable link to the Times article (available with UWS login)
The 25 Most Influential Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years: T 25.Requires UWS credentials to access (note: this is the same NYTimes article that is linked, above).
The article begins: "Despite its millions of recipes, the internet hasn’t killed cookbooks. Instead, the genre’s fans seem more motivated than ever to collect and use them — and not just for making dinner. . . "
Comita, J., Battilana, J., Bush, T., Cheng, M., Kauffman, J., Snyder, M., Stanek, A., & Wilson, K. (2024). The 25 Most Influential Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years: T 25. New York Times Company.
First Entry: “ The Taste of Country Cooking” by Edna Lewis, 1976
Elegy and Remembrance in the Cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis, by Rafia ZafarSummary: "Cookbooks should be thought of as more than collections of instructions for preparing individual dishes and meals. We should read cookbooks as a literary genre in and of themselves, whether as romances, memoirs, histories, or, as I will argue, elegies mourning a lost loved one or memorializing a vanished place. Alice B. Toklas's The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking (1976) explicitly acknowledge the role that cookbooks play in recapturing an individual or a place. The authors" respective sets of culinary instructions and gastronomic memories demonstrate how cookbooks participate in multiple genres and in fact engage with the elegiac, if not the elegy itself."
Zafar, R. (2013). Elegy and remembrance in the cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis. MELUS, 38(4), 32–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24570016
Second entry: “The Joy of Cooking” by Irma S. Rombauer, 1931
Third entry, "“Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child, 1961"
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by E.J. LevyOpening paragraph reads: "I have no photograph of my mother cooking, but when I recall my
childhood this is how I picture her: standing in the kitchen of our suburban ranch house, a blue-and- white-checked terry cloth apron tied at her waist, her lovely head bent over a recipe, a hiss of frying butter, a smell of onions and broth, and open like a hymnal on the counter beside her, a copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. . . "
Levy, E. J. (2004). Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs), 144/145, 188–198.
Fourth entry: “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” by Claudia Roden, 1968
The Economist Asks: Claudia RodenIn this podcast episode, available with your UWS login: "In 1956 the Suez Crisis forced the Egyptian-born cookery writer and her Jewish family to flee Cairo for London. She tells Anne McElvoy why she collected the recipes of fellow refugees to keep the flavours of home alive and what food tells us about stories of migration. The octogenarian author of “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” and “Med” spills the secrets of her kitchen – from embracing mistakes to what to cook for the festive season."
The Economist Asks: Claudia Roden. (2021, Nov 25). London: The Economist Intelligence Unit N.A., Incorporated. https://link.uwsuper.edu:9433/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/audio-video-works/economist-asks-claudia-roden/docview/2602046429/se-2
Fifth entry: “An Invitation to Indian Cooking” by Madhur Jaffrey, 1973
