Mediating Food Culture: Cookbooks, Technology and Documentation
Does digital technology mean we engage less with our cookbooks, or more?
Procuring, preparing, and eating are fundamental human activities we have in common with every human being on the planet who has ever existed. The consumption of food transcends geography, ethnicity, age, gender, social class or historical era. Foods and recipes are signifiers of specific human cultures. Moving far beyond a mere means of survival, food is a culture in itself.
It’s important to note that food culture can exist without written documentation, as demonstrated by the oral food histories of Indigenous peoples, yet as settlers, which I am, I don’t have access to these histories in the same way as those that have been written down. The technological and internet revolution of the past 25 or so years has changed the way we document and share our food histories. Ephemeral food texts can now be preserved by digitizing them, and new ways of digital archiving, including transcription and tagging make the words themselves accessible and available for scholarly research and analysis. In additional to these databases, there has been an explosion of online food blogs and websites, existing fully digital, never to display the faded ink of handwritten annotations or the telltale spatters of frequent use. Every recipe we would ever need (and then some) is there for the taking at the end of a simple Google search.
Where do these new technologies leave the printed recipe book?Does technology mean a decline in our engagement with cookbooks and our written recipes? It doesn’t, in fact, these are the exact types of texts that archivists are looking to preserve through digitization, though it is a very different experience than extracting a rare cookbook from an archive and carefully perusing recipes that may be hundreds of years old. Despite the ease with which we can now access food texts via digital means, there must surely be value in the intangible; those bits and pieces of anecdotal information that only a text on paper can yield. The question we can ask is how technology changes the way we document new food texts, and engage with existing ones.
My interest lies in answering these questions, through case studies which explicate how digital technologies intersect, interact, and mediate food culture, and our human-food interactions.
What is Food Culture?
In an attempt to broadly define food culture, let’s briefly summarize its history. How did we arrive from being hunter-gatherers to such a large portion of our culture defined by food and all its rituals?
Early peoples did not document what they ate, but they did leave behind traces of it. Middens, essentially the rubbish piles of early peoples, and coprolites — fossilized excrement — hold lots of clues about what prehistoric people ate. Cracked open bones found in middens tell us we extracted and ate the rich bone marrow, still very much a delicacy today.[1] Coprolites containing seeds and fibres from plants have helped to unlock the ancient history of agriculture. We know that 10,000 years ago when humans began farming, our diets changed from wild plants to crops of wheat and barley. The discovery of fire brought cooking, and since we needed something to hold food over a fire, cooking pots were invented. Grain was fermented to make bread (and beer), and raw food was cooked. Civilizations were formed around where the food was grown and stored, and geography connected people to the foods they ate. Entrenched into daily life, foods and cooking methods became ritualized events, cemented into the histories of peoples and their celebrations. Food for survival became cooking, and regional cuisines and their associated customs became as much about pleasure as sustenance. Food culture was not so much born as it was slowly integrated into the broader cultural practices of widespread agriculture, religion, and ritualistic celebration.[2]
Along the way, something else happened too. Food became a representation[3]; dishes became signifiers of concepts and traditions. If your mother always makes a particular cake for your birthday, that cake also represents of the concept of “birthday”. The recipe for that cake becomes a historical artifact about birthdays in your family. Food, and the memories and traditions embedded in it are inseparable from each other. The Italian history scholar Massimo Montanari connects the symbols of food culture to food culture itself when he says, “when we speak of food and culture, we are not speaking of two different realities, separate or even opposite, but of a single reality: food is culture”.[4] Food culture isn’t just a part of who we are, it is who we are.
Documenting Food Culture
So then, food culture encompasses the cultural practices and beliefs of a group of people, relating to food. There is something else involved that is not as easy to define, and that is how this documentation is a culture in itself. Meals are ephemeral things and food traditions cannot survive if they are not documented in some way. Without some sort of record, the history of food only lives as long as our memories, or as long as they continue to be passed down through oral histories, which is the mode of dissemination in many cultures. For food culture to live beyond the end of the people who create and make the food, and to ensure oral histories are not lost, there must be documentation of these practices and rituals. These can be written transcripts of oral histories, recipes, cookbooks, and in the digital age, food websites and blogs, TikTok videos, Instagram posts, and the digitization of food texts. This in itself can be seen as its own culture – the traditions and stories about food provide a context to human existence that is unique to other histories. They are narratives specific to food, which provide insights into the lives of women, race and racism, times of plenty or want, home economics, household practices, specific celebrations and traditions, and the social structures of a particular era.
So what information can these artifacts capture? In a recipe or cookbook, the dish has a name and often allocated to a particular mealtime. In early food texts, there is no standardization, and often the “recipe” is simply a set of instructions with no measurements or cooking temperatures. There is a list the ingredients used and their quantities, the techniques involved and the order of preparation, equipment, times and temperatures, and maybe a photo of the dish. You may do as I do and annotate your cookbooks with the dates you made the recipe and what the occasion was, whether it turned out well or how it could be improved next time.
Handwritten recipes that have been passed along, possibly attached to a letter with some personal notes, sometimes contain information about where the ingredients came from, a line or two about a trip to a particular farmers market, the use of a garden crop, or some spices procured on a holiday.
The recipe itself can also hold more than just the instructions on how to make a dish. Consider this title: “Annie’s Lasagna”. The addition of a name turns a recipe into a little bit of history too. Who is/was Annie? How did she come up with this recipe that was unique to only her, and when? Who was it shared with? These notes, letters, and other details add unique human context to food, and a book of handwritten recipes can document the food history of a person’s entire life. Long form food blogs are rich with backstories in addition to the recipes themselves. If we analyze all of these contextual pieces, it’s clear our records of food can become rich cultural artifacts that speak to the history of a person, a family, or entire communities.
Part I: Digitizing Food Culture on Paper
Digesting Data: The Sifter
If you look closely, all these tidbits of information are something more: they’re data[5]. Food culture data, especially if it’s searchable, becomes a powerful tool for multiple areas of research. Historians, sociologists, food culturalists, and as food and cooking is a highly gendered practice, scholars of women and gender studies see the value in gathering all the ephemera of food history and transforming it in a way that facilitates fine-grained interpretation of the data embedded in it.
The curator of the Schlesinger Library Culinary Collection at Harvard agrees. Barbara Ketchum Wheaton is the food historian behind The Sifter, an online database of more than 5000 culinary texts from centuries of food history. Catalogued by author, key ingredients, techniques, and section titles, she hopes these texts will encourage research projects in different areas, such as how cooking practices can reveal gendered economics[6]. Because the site is organized into datasets, it’s very easy to research one particular ingredient, and trace its use throughout the more than a thousand years of cookbooks in the database. A search of “quince” turned up a recipe for “quinces or wardens[7] in paste” from a set of two cookery books from 1430, as well as a recipe for Pippin and Quince Tarts from 1972, with another four-hundred or so in between.
Tarts and marmalade and cakes! Searching for quince on The Sifter
Curating hundreds of food texts into an online database not only provides data for research but keeps the food culture from the past alive and open to revisiting. The Sifter does not contain the texts themselves, but all the information required to track them down, in case you feel the urge to make a 15th century recipe for quince paste. If you’re a researcher, or just a food nerd like me who happens to have a quince tree, this is a very good thing.
A Banquet of Books: The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective
In the late 17th century, a lady named Jane Dawson lent her tidy, lilting handwriting to a book of recipes with colourful titles and interesting techniques. Her “Eggs in Moonshine” is “egg yolks poached in a rose-scented sugar syrup until they “glister,”…served in a dish whose rim has been ‘rubbed’ with aqua vitae and is set alight at the table.”[8]
The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) was started in 2012 as a way to provide more open access to historical culinary and medicinal recipes or receipts, including those of Jane Dawson, from across multiple manuscript libraries. The ultimate goal is “an accessible and searchable corpus of recipe books currently in manuscript. By enabling users to search by ingredient, date, process, person, disease, and type, we will be able to learn a lot about how early modern people interacted with each other and with their environments.”[9]
Unlike The Sifter, EMROC has the functionality for viewing the scanned manuscripts themselves (they are things of beauty!) as well as the transcribed versions – the products of something EMROC calls a transcribathon. Current scanning technology struggles to decode the curly script of old handwriting, so every year, a group of volunteers take part in an all-day, multi-continent event where manuscripts are transcribed by human hands and eyes into searchable text. The events are given a twenty-first century spin by assigning hashtags, searchable on Twitter, to open intersectional conversations about the contents of the manuscripts. The #feministOED hashtag spurred discussion about the problems with dictionaries, modelled on male writing, which often do not include many of the words and terms used by the female writers of many of the manuscripts. (To hear more about EMROC and the transcribathon, listen to the podcast, here. )
Jane Dawson’s Cookbook, image via The Folger Shakespeare Library
Part II: Born Digital
Technology Becomes Culture: Epicurious.com
Given the massive online presence of food websites and recipes online, it can be difficult to imagine a time when there were no online recipes at all. In 1995, the internet, then called “The Information Superhighway”, boasted a grand total of 23,500 websites, a number that had increased by 758% over 1994.[10] That year marked the launch of the first-ever recipe website, Epicurious, still up and running after 25 years. The meat and potatoes of the site is their massive recipe database, the first of its kind, but also the first you could search by keyword, save to a recipe box, share, and discuss in online communities. Up to this point, the only way to access recipes on this scale would be to browse books at the library or sift through your own collection.
Early Epicurious, courtesy of Epicurious.com
In 1995, electronic scanners had limited capability when it came to processing the numbers and symbols in recipe texts. To transcribe the more than five thousand recipes to be included in their initial database, Epicurious turned to The Electronic Scriptorium, a group of monks in Virginia[11] who transcribed them all by hand. Despite technology, it seems a human touch was still required.
Epicurious, and the thousands of food websites it preceded, fundamentally changed the way we engage with food texts, creating a digital branch of food culture which was entirely new. A full eleven years before social media, the discussions that arose around the subject of food on the message boards were an astounding development: the users became the most important part. When people began forming communities around food, sharing recipes and kitchen pratfalls, the technical abilities of the platform were transcended and food on the internet truly became a part of our culture.[12]
Rochelle Udell, one of the founders of Epicurious sees the link between changes to our food culture brought about by this digital revolution. “We were first, so that is an enormous advantage, and look at the culture of food. In the last twenty years, food has become a huge cultural interest.”[13]
Digital Food Stories: The Culture of the Food Blog
Jane Dawson’s treasured book of recipes can be seen as the polar opposite of today’s food blog. Unlike Jane’s book, and many others that chiefly remained in the domain of the private kitchen, food blogs are completely accessible to a wide audience, sharable across social media platforms, and make their way into the kitchens of the world within seconds. Exposure to food cultures that was once limited by travel, or perhaps exploring an ethnically concentrated enclave in a large city, was accelerated and available for free consumption.
Food blogs are the personal representations of food culture, and that of their larger community, made public. Niche blogs which focus on a specific cultural cuisine have contributed to the current level of knowledge of world food. Ingredients and dishes that were once obscure and exotic have become mainstream. Evidence of this can be found in any large supermarket: harissa and galangal, curry pastes and masa, kimchi and ghee; ingredients once only available in specialty markets or cultural neighbourhoods in large cities, are now commonplace even in smaller cities.
While exposure and appreciation of myriad food cultures is a positive, there are ethical[14] and political issues embedded into the ease of publishing and sharing information on the internet. Blogging is not always value-neutral[15]. White food bloggers have been criticized for culinary appropriation, using their platforms to promote recipes they claim to be their own, but borrow heavily and sometimes outright copy the food of other cultures which the authors have likely been exposed to via the internet. Recently New York Times food writer and blogger Alison Roman was called out for one of her trademark quick and easy meals. The famous recipe, for the stew, is a curry that she has claimed as her own without any mention of its cultural provenance, a practice that critic Roxana Hadadi refers to as culinary colonization. The democratizing effect of the internet means there is a risk of diluting and homogenizing food culture, turning a dish of curry into a white person’s “stew”.
my own (and utterly neglected) little food blog, the human kitchen
Part III: Liaisons Between Printed Food Culture and The Digital Realm
Eat Your Books
Digital technology, for the most part, means we engage less with printed culinary texts, including our cookbooks. It’s too easy to just Google a recipe rather than scouring our own books for one. What if technology can provide new ways of engaging with our material food culture? Using the tools available at Eat Your Books, users can catalogue cookbooks they already own, transforming their culinary libraries into a searchable database. The site has indexed more than 160,000 cookbooks, magazines, and blogs that can be added to the user’s own bookshelf to be searched later.
This liaison between printed and digital culture encourages greater hands-on engagement with texts, continued handwritten annotations, and a richer development of the history around a recipe. All those notes and splatters that tell a unique story of how, and when you cooked, will continue to live on, thanks to this intuitive and simple technology. [16]
Lost Recipes, Found.
Food culture ephemera is not limited to cookbooks or handwritten recipes, but also tear-off recipes from grocery stores, newspaper clippings, appliance booklets, recipes from food packaging, and self-published recipe books from schools, churches, and historical societies. These materials are even less likely to survive than printed cookbooks. They were cut or torn or printed on flimsy materials. A cutting is more likely to get tossed in a drawer of a folder and later purged, or in the case of newsprint, simply disintegrates. Since the turn of the 20th century, and especially starting in the late 1940’s with the rise of the modern supermarket, a large part of western food culture was built around the new wave of processed and packaged foods which often came with recipes printed on the packaging. These lost recipes represent a good portion of what North Americans were cooking and eating at the time.
Lost Recipes Found is a repository for these transient pieces of food culture. Using a fairly basic interface[17], the site categorizes recipes contributed by users, who gather on the want-ad style message boards. The site also includes recipes from closed down restaurants and tea rooms in an effort to rescue these pieces of culinary history. To illustrate the leap from old recipe to a more current food culture relevance, founder Monica Cass Rogers makes and photographs the recipes on her very modern blog, enticing new cooks to revive recipes formerly dismissed as culinary relics.
Epilogue
What I have written is only a small part of how food culture is mediated by various technologies, and it is certainly not an exhaustive study. As with most research, questions have been answered while many more have been brought to light. Food culture takes shape across multiple dimensions, intersected by history, representation, gender politics, ethnicity and race, data, and of course, technology, creating infinite threads of future discovery and scholarship. The context of food culture as mediated by technology, is huge.
It seems clear that the technologies we use to document our culinary activities can influence the evolution of food culture. Technologies for documenting our history have changed, which means the ways we engage with those documents has also changed. Just as food and culture are inseparably bound, so are food culture and technology. No one could have predicted, least of all Jane Dawson, that our food culture would be so influenced and mediated by technological developments.
I believe we are at a food-as-culture crossroads that is being shaped by digital technology, but what is interesting is that we continue to document, create, photograph, and yes, even write down with ink and paper our kitchen traditions. What’s important is that as we use these new technologies, we preserve the human-ness expressed in our food culture. Our desire to keep our histories alive doesn’t seem to change, even if the technologies that document it, inevitably will.
Coda
As I mentioned, this topic is so full of potential, it could be a book, or an entire podcast in itself, and it was difficult to choose only a few areas to focus on.
Let me just say, making a podcast, or rather a quality podcast, is really hard. I know now why there are teams of sound editors, producers, researchers, writers, and interns who make the best of the best podcasts. This podcast went through four rounds of edits! Having done this one by myself, with some editing help from my tech-savvy partner, I have new respect for those who make all the great podcasts I enjoy listening to.
I learned there is an art to interviewing, and to stitching an hour of conversation into something engaging and interesting. The idea of including a podcast with this essay was to animate the topic, and I hope it has done that. A lot of that credit goes to my guest on the podcast, Dr. Mairi Cowan from the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, who had the best stories, and is really great at telling them.
Notes
[1] Civitello, L. (2011). Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People. In Cuisine and Culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. p. 44
[2] Civitello, L. (2011). Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People. In Cuisine and Culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. p. 41
[3] representation as defined by the OED: Something which stands for or denotes another symbolically; an image, a symbol, a sign.
[4] Montanari, Massimo. (2012). Let the Meatballs Rest : And Other Stories About Food and Culture. Columbia University Press.
[5] data as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “Related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation.”
[6] Gattuso, Reina. 2020. “A Database Of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, And You Can Help Improve It”. Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-find-historic-cookbooks.
[7] A warden is an old variety of baking pear.
[8] 2020. https://www.manuscriptcookbookssurvey.org/collection/Detail/manuscripts/78.
[9] “About”. 2020. Emroc. https://emroc.hypotheses.org/about.
[10] 2020. https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/.
[11] Bratley, Paul, and Serge Lusignan. “The Electronic Scriptorium.” Computers and the Humanities 13, no. 2 (1979): 93-103. Accessed December 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30207857.
[12] Gillin, Eric. 2015. “The Oral History Of The Launch Of Epicurious”. Epicurious. https://www.epicurious.com/about/epicurious-oral-history-article.
[13] Gillin, Eric. 2015. “The Oral History Of The Launch Of Epicurious”. Epicurious. https://www.epicurious.com/about/epicurious-oral-history-article.
[14] Ethical, adj., as defined by the OED: Of or relating to moral principles, esp. as forming a system, or the branch of knowledge or study dealing with these
[15] value-neutral as defined by the OED: adj. involving no value judgements, neutral with respect to (personal or group) value
[16] Full disclosure: I use, and love this site, and have catalogued the hundreds of books in my collection (and also part of my collection of Gourmet magazines dating from the early 60’s)
[17] Interface as defined by the OED: A means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.
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