Full Description
A History of Cookbooks provides a sweeping literary and historical overview of the cookbook genre, exploring its development as a part of food culture beginning in the Late Middle Ages. Studying cookbooks from various Western cultures and languages, Henry Notaker traces the transformation of recipes from brief notes with ingredients into detailed recipes with a specific structure, grammar, and vocabulary. In addition, he reveals that cookbooks go far beyond offering recipes: they tell us a great deal about nutrition, morals, manners, history, and menus while often providing entertaining reflections and commentaries. This innovative book demonstrates that cookbooks represent an interesting and important branch of nonfiction literature.
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE. FOOD AND TEXT-COOK AND WRITER
Prologue: A Rendezvous
1. The Cook
2. Writer and Author
PART TWO. THE TEXT AND ITS FORM
3. The Origin and Early Development of Modern Cookbooks
4. Printed Cookbooks: Diffusion, Translation, and Plagiarism
5. Organizing the Cookbook
6. Naming the Recipes
7. Pedagogical and Didactic Approaches
8. Paratexts in Cookbooks
9. The Recipe Form
10. The Cookbook Genre
PART THREE. THE TEXT AND ITS WORLD
11. Cookbooks for the Rich and the Poor
12. Health and Medicine in Cookbooks
13. Recipes for Fat Days and Lean Days
14. Vegetarian Cookbooks
15. Jewish Cookbooks
16. Cookbooks and Aspects of Nationalism
17. Decoration, Illusion, and Entertainment
18. Taste and Pleasure
19. Gender in Cookbooks and Household Books
Epilogue: Cookbooks and the Future
Notes
References
Index
