{"id":1340,"date":"2018-08-11T08:55:18","date_gmt":"2018-08-11T08:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:37:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:37:40","slug":"food-on-the-page-united-tastes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/08\/11\/food-on-the-page-united-tastes\/","title":{"rendered":"Megan J. Elias. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald. United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Megan J. Elias. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald. United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.<\/h1>\n\n
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Editor<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Megan J. Elias. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture.<\/a><\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 296p. ISBN 9780812249170. US$ 34.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald. United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook. <\/a><\/em>Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017. 351p., ill. ISBN 9781625343222. US$ 32.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cookbooks have always been vital sources for food studies scholars, because they presumably document what foods people have eaten and how they have prepared them. In these two engrossing studies, researchers move beyond recipes to investigate how cookbooks function as crucial national texts in the United States and as fruitful topics of print culture research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Elias contends in her introduction, cookbooks are texts that are both \u201creflective and formative of their own culture\u201d (3). Thus, if we are what we eat, cookbooks make us American. However, Food on the Page<\/em> is not a simple analysis of ingredients and instructions: Elias states that she is not interested in what Americans ate but rather how cookbooks have shaped readers\u2019 understandings of what American food is from the eighteenth century to the present. Her ambitious goal, however, means that she has bitten off more than she can chew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elias structures her study around ideas, not dishes or decades, and since she does not provide a bibliographic essay or appendix of the titles she consulted in her research, it is difficult to accept this work as the comprehensive history of American cookbooks Elias intimates that it is (5). Furthermore, Food on the Page<\/em> is akin to an overcrowded potluck table rather than a delectable meal of carefully planned courses, because Elias covers numerous not necessarily related topics in each chapter. For instance, in \u201cThe Best-Fed People in the World: American Cookbooks in the Nineteenth Century,\u201d Elias discusses antebellum cookbooks, community cookbooks, regional cookbooks, and cookbooks composed by \u201cwriters in the progressive style\u201d (35). The second chapter discusses cookbooks devoted to war rationing, corporate cookbooks (those written by refrigerator, stove, and appliance manufacturers), and weight-loss cookbooks. Elias\u2019 extensive research is laudable, but in choosing to put so many topics on the table, the most tantalizing parts of her study \u2013 the rise in Southern cookbooks after the Civil War and the Frigidaire Company\u2019s deft deployment of \u201ccoolness\u201d (63) as both a human and sensory descriptor as a concept in its cookbook, for examples \u2013 lose their flavor. It is also curious that the bulk of the chapter that print culture scholars will find most useful \u2013 \u201cGourmet is a Boy\u201d \u2013 focuses primarily on food magazines and not cookbooks, and that another section of the study treats food memoirs, a topic tangentially related to the book\u2019s title and stated purpose. While print culture scholars interested in cookbooks will find much to chew on in Food on the Page<\/em>, they should read the book with a grain of salt, knowing that Elias\u2019 study is eclectic rather than authoritative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elias asserts that Amelia Simmons\u2019 American Cookery<\/em> is considered the first American cookbook, because it includes \u201crecipes for originally American foodstuffs such as corn and turkey\u201d (9). Other food studies scholars have concurred, noting that the 1796 edition of the cookbook includes recipes for several pumpkin dishes, including pie, and also features pearl ash rather than yeast as a leavener. In their meticulously researched study of American Cookery<\/em>, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald maintain that such patriotic celebrations of the cookbook dismiss its historical importance as a published text. Their research contextualizes the cookbook in ways readers will find exemplary: investigating the printers who first brought out the book; comparing the 1796 Hartford edition to the 1808 Albany edition; mapping the dates of the book\u2019s advertisements; exploring the origins of the plagiarized recipes; examining the significance of the author\u2019s professed identity as an orphan; and situating it in the literary, social, ecological, political, and environments of early Connecticut. For the authors of United Tastes<\/em>, the recipes in American Cookery<\/em> are perhaps the least interesting aspect of it, though they propose a convincing answer to a question that has perturbed many food studies scholars: why the arrangement of the recipes in the book is so haphazard. The authors explain that this organization distinguishes American Cookery<\/em> from its English predecessors: it was a work that \u201cwas part of an endeavor to integrate all grades of life, from plebeian to patrician, in middling well-being and harmony\u201d in a nation where \u201cfancy food was being simplified and plain food enhanced\u201d (200).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subsequently, the authors incorporate genealogies of printers\u2019 families, peddlers\u2019 inventories, colonial portraiture conventions, poetry by the Connecticut Wits, agricultural reports, literacy statistics, and Federalist political philosophies into an argument about American Cookery<\/em> that is not about food at all. Rather, they claim that the book was \u201cpart of an effort by the prominent citizens of Connecticut to win cultural leadership of the new nation known as the United States\u201d (263). Such a conclusion seems anticlimactic after digesting the monumental research the authors have invested in the book; to be sure, Stavely\u2019s and Fitzgerald\u2019s conclusion may seem reductively regional, as may the many contextual tangents upon which the authors embark. Despite its appetizing title (\u201ctastes\u201d is a deliberate anagram of \u201cstates\u201d), the book will not satisfy the appetites of all readers. Those not interested in arcane details about Connecticut\u2019s early state history or its famous personages (aside from Noah Webster and Timothy Dwight) may find the many contextual tangents on which the authors embark quite tedious to read. As well, when Stavely and Fitzgerald synthesize their archival discoveries to surmise who Amelia Simmons actually was and how American Cookery<\/em> came to be written, they admit that readers may find their hypothesis \u201cconjectural\u201d (243). But there can be no doubt that this book will inspire more print culture projects on American Cookery<\/em>, as the content in the chapters, the expertly composed notes, and the thorough appendices on \u201cThe Sources of American Cookery<\/em>,\u201d \u201cRecipes from Plain to Fancy,\u201d and \u201cEditions, Printings, and Major Plagiarisms\u201d will inspire its audiences to read \u2013 or re-read \u2013 the first American cookbook, \u201cthe story of a cook\u2019s determination to buck the odds and become an author\u201d (268) as well as a repository for pumpkin, corn, and turkey recipes. As in Elias\u2019 Food on the Page<\/em>, the overall efficacy of United Tastes <\/em>is compromised by the surfeit of ingredients in each chapter, but each book advances the fields of both food and print culture studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia Ehrhardt
University of Oklahoma<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan J. Elias. Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 296p. ISBN 9780812249170. US$ 34.95. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald. United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017. 351p., ill. ISBN 9781625343222. US$ 32.95. Cookbooks have always been vital sources for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5348,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1942,1950,1956],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-north-america","tag-print-culture","tag-recipe-books"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5716,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/5716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}