American Cookbook Celebrates Its Bicentennial
On its bicentennial birthday, the American cookbook is finally getting the attention it deserves as an
intimate diary of our nation's history.
By David Belman
Amelia Simmons made history 200 years ago when she published the first edition of American Cookery, widely reputed to be the first cookbook written in America, by an American, for Americans. The book was hardly extensive by today's standards; running just 47 pages, with many recipes no more than one or two lines long, the book was little more than a collection of suggestions. But the first American cookbook quickly became a best-seller, attracting plagiarists and inspiring reprints until 1831, when Simmons published the last updated edition of the book.
Prior to the publication of Simmons' book, five popular British cookbooks, known as receipt books, cookerie books or culinary reviews, had been republished in America, the first in 1742. And indeed, Simmons' book borrowed heavily from British receipt books of the period, most notably Susannah Carter's The Frugal Housewife, first reprinted in Boston in 1772.
But despite its British model, American Cookery had a distinctively American flavor: It was the first book to include recipes using indigenous American ingredients. In addition to five recipes calling for cornmea, three for "Indian Pudding," one for "Johnny Cake" or "Hoe Cake," and one for "Indian Flapjacks;" this cookerie book included a recipe for "Pompkin' Pie." Other culinary innovations that defined the book as a truly American work included the use of corncobs to smoke bacon, a roast-turkey recipe that suggested a "cramberry"-sauce accompaniment and the introduction of the Native American word "squash."
But it isn't American Cookery's recipes that culinary scholars and historians have been discussing and celebrating this year at events around the country. Rather, it is the 200 years of American cookbookery that followed that landmark 1796 publication.
For most of the past two centuries, cookbooks have been overlooked, unappreciated or simply ignored. But during the past few years, they have finally been recognized for what they are - historical treasures, commercial phenomena and some of the most accurate gauges of the culinary state of the country.
Finally, 200 years after Simmons' ground-breaking
publication, cookbooks are stirring up some long-deserved interest. History by the (cook) book"Cookbooks tell us about America," says Jan Longone, a culinary historian and the proprietor of The Wine and Food Library, one of the world's foremost antiquarian
wine-and-food bookshops. "Everyone has to eat, and there is an incredible untapped record of our history that has developed from that need," says Longone. "Cookbooks document, in a very personal way, the history of this country. . . . [They] are a record of the daily lives of people, their homes and their entertaining lives."
"Cookbooks tell a lot about how we live, what's important to us and how our society changes," says Nancy Byal, executive food editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine and this year's book awards chairperson for the Julia Child Cookbook Awards. "You may not learn all that much from one cookbook, but if you look at the multiplicity of cookbooks, and look over time, you can see how people have lived, how they have eaten, what they're doing today and what they might do tomorrow. It's a real portrait of society."
According to Longone, "you [can] see all the historical movements in the country through cookbooks." When Americans started moving west, cookbooks began to appear with information on how to cook while crossing the prairie. Recessions and depressions are documented by cookbooks offering tips for economical cooking. The end of the Civil War inspired cookbooks by white Southern women that discuss Emancipation and its impact on the Southern kitchen.
But the documentation of historical movements is only one small secret held by 200 years of American cookbooks. "Community cookbooks tell an incredible story of the social movements in the country," says Longone. Community or charity cookbooks, published to raise money for various causes, began to appear with frequency during the Civil War era. Over the past decades, they have been written to raise funds for such disparate causes as the women's-suffrage movement, the temperance movement and the black-power movement.
Beyond offering information about social changes and historical movements, cookbooks also offer insight into economic history, printing history and of course, culinary history. And yet, despite such a wealth of information, they have never commanded much attention during their two centuries in this country.
Experts point to a number of reasons for this neglect. Some feminist scholars actively ignore cookbooks because cooking and kitchens are seen as a badge of dishonor - a symbol of women's oppression. Other researchers and scholars see cookbooks as little more than guidebooks for scrambling eggs.
"When things are so ordinary, they tend to be invisible," says Barbara Haber, curator of a 12,000-volume cookbook collection at Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library. "Since food is so familiar, everybody thinks he or she knows everything there is to know about it, so it's not taken seriously," she says. "People think they already know all about food, so they tend to dismiss the subject."
In the past two decades, though, American cooking has come of age, and, so too has the American cookbook. "In the last five to 10 years, culinary history [has taken] on a life of its own," says Haber. "A lot of people surfaced who really have an abiding interest in the history of food, and they've started using the library specifically for the cookbook collection. Amateurs still dominate the field, but academics are starting to accept culinary history as a serious subject."
Recipe for successful sales
The growing interest in the study of cookbooks is not an isolated phenomenon. Experts differ on a date for the explosion in cookbook authoring and sales, but most agree that cookbooks are enjoying unprecedented commercial success.
Cookbooks and craft books account for only about 10 percent of trade publishing's $4 billion annual sales, but purchases of new cookbooks and wine books have increased sharply since 1991, according to the American Booksellers Association, located in Tarrytown, New York. In 1995, 41.8 million cookbooks and wine books were purchased nationally. That's up from 27.5 million books in 1991.
No organization tracks numbers of new titles published by genre, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of cookbook titles is increasing at a substantial pace. According to Kate Jackman, cookbook buyer for Ann Arbor, Michigan based Borders Books, "the number of available [cookbook] titles is definitely increasing. Cookbooks are such a strong sales area that publishers that have never published cookbooks before are suddenly publishing two or three cookbooks. Even academic presses will have at least one cookbook on their list."
"Cookbooks have always been a strong item for us, and they continue to be," says Jennifer Wolfertz, a spokesperson for Barnes & Noble, headquartered in New York City. "Publishers have a lot more cookbooks, and there's been a huge increase in the number of titles available."
While many of those cookbooks fail to earn back their advances, a select few go on to become best-sellers. And unlike most other books, cookbooks have an incredibly long shelf life. The Betty Crocker Picture Cook-Book, first published in 1950, has sold more than 45 million copies to date. More than 10 million copies of Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931, have been sold, and this classic book of basics still sells more than 100,000 copies a year. More recently, Sheila Lukins' and Julee Rosso's popular cooking tome, Silver Palate, has sold more than 2 million copies.
A continuing infatuation
Why so many more cookbooks? And why do sales continue to rise? Those questions become even more confounding when you take into account the increasing percentage of the food dollar spent outside the home. According to National Restaurant Association research, Americans are expected to spend 44 percent of their food dollar outside the home in 1996. So, although Americans are cooking less, they are nevertheless buying more cookbooks.
In part, the growth in the number of available cookbook titles reflects a phenomenon pervasive in our culture - an infatuation with fads. "It's a typically American phenomenon," says Judith Jones, senior editor and vice president at Knopf Inc., best known for her work on Julia Child's first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, and for her work with chef Andrae Soltner. "There's a fad, and suddenly you need a zillion cookbooks about that fad," says Jones. "Grains, pyramid, low fat, low cholesterol. This country is seduced by fads, and that keeps the cookbook industry busy."
The explosion in cookbook titles has also been driven by cookbook authors and chefs. In the past decade, chefs have emerged as celebrities in this country, and a market has been created for their cookbooks.
"For a chef, writing a cookbook is a natural thing to do," says Marcel Desaulniers, co-owner of The Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia, and author of five cookbooks. Working in an industry where the art is ephemeral, a cookbook is an artifact that lasts. "It is a chef's dream to have something concrete that you can point to as your accomplishment," says Desaulniers.
Cookbooks also fill more roles today than ever before. Some people still buy a cookbook because they want to cook out of it, but that's not the only reason to buy one. "Some people read cookbooks to fall asleep at night," says Nora Pouillon, chef/owner of Washington DC's Restaurant Nora and Asia Nora, and author of Cooking with Nora. "Cookbooks also appeal to people who want to travel in their minds."
For others, "cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture," says Mark Miller, owner of Santa Fe's Coyote Cafe and author of six cookbooks. "People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life."
Cookbooks have also replaced mothers
in the kitchen. As two-worker households become the norm rather than an anomaly, a new generation has been forced to turn to cookbooks as teachers. In years past, children "experienced cooking through osmosis in the kitchens of the American family," suggests Knopf's Jones. "Today, there is no question that people have turned to cookbooks for teaching, for explanation and for hand-holding."
Reading between the lines
Each of these reasons for the explosion in cookbook authoring, publishing and sales - the proliferation of fads, the introduction of the chef cookbook, the creation of the coffee-table cookbook and the need for cookbook as teacher - tells part of the story. But taken as a whole, these explanations still don't account or the almost simultaneous increase in interest in the cookbook as historical and cultural artifact.
Perhaps the reason for the increasing interest in and commercial success of cookbooks reveals something about more than just the cookbook itself: Maybe the newfound attention signifies a country coming of age.
Until recently, food never commanded much attention or respect in America; consequently, the texts devoted to the study of food and food arts were never explored. But now, two centuries after Simmons' first homage to American food, Americans may finally be recognizing the importance of culinary history and tradition as one of the driving forces in the creation and maintenance of our culture. And it only took 200 years.
