Old cookbooks as historical sources: what a recipe book can prove

Between 1917 and 1918, three of the books on this shelf told American women to fill their pantries with jars: Butler’s booklet in 1917, then Rockwell’s Save It for Winter and Hughes’s Everywoman’s Canning Book in 1918. That cluster is not a coincidence. The United States entered the First World War in April 1917, and the new US Food Administration spent the next two years urging households to waste less, eat less wheat and meat, and preserve what they grew.

A historian reading those three books learns something no single one of them states outright: food at home had become a patriotic duty, and companies, publishers and volunteer kitchens all moved to supply it.

What a cookbook can and cannot prove

A cookbook records what someone thought people should cook, or could be persuaded to buy. It does not record dinner. The White Ribbon Cook Book of 1894 proves that a temperance publisher wanted kitchens free of wine and brandy; it does not prove that its readers stopped cooking with sherry. Historians call this the gap between prescription and practice, and every good argument from cookbooks keeps it in view.

Within that limit, cookbooks are rich evidence for four things: what ingredients were available and affordable, what techniques and equipment were assumed, what values were attached to food, and who was speaking to whom.

Kinds of cookbook, kinds of evidence

Community and church cookbooks

Capital City Recipes (Raleigh, 1908) and the Brewster Book of Recipes (Detroit, 1921) were compiled by church women’s groups from members’ own recipes. They are the closest a printed cookbook gets to practice, because the recipes came out of local kitchens and often carry contributors’ names. They also show regional food clearly: gumbo, shad and deviled crabs in Raleigh; salmon loaf and oyster cocktails in Detroit.

Cause cookbooks

Some books exist to argue. The temperance cookbook is one example, and the vegetarian health cookery of the period is another: Evora Bucknum Perkins’s Laurel Health Cookery (1911) came out of Seventh-day Adventist health teaching. Read the prefaces closely; they state the cause, and the recipes show how far the authors were willing to go for it.

Company and institutional booklets

Butler’s 1917 booklet was compiled for a maker of home canning outfits and doubles as the manual for its cookers. A Chicago bank, the Northern Trust Company, issued Cooking Hints and Helps to Reduce the Cost of Living. These are evidence of how businesses used domestic advice to reach customers, and of which anxieties (spoilage, rising prices) they thought would sell.

Cooking-school textbooks

Janet McKenzie Hill’s Practical Cooking and Serving opens with the chemistry of food. That choice belongs to the domestic science movement, which wanted cooking taught as an applied science and housework treated as a profession. Textbooks show the ideal most clearly, and they are the furthest from ordinary practice.

Turning a pile of books into a question

“Cookbooks in the early twentieth century” is a topic, not a question, and a paper built on it will drift. A workable research question names a comparison and a reason. For example:

• How did the advice on canning vegetables change between Neil’s 1914 book and the wartime books of 1918, and what explains the change?
• What do two church cookbooks, from Raleigh in 1908 and Detroit in 1921, show about regional food in the urban South and Midwest?
• How did vegetarian cookbooks of 1909 to 1917 justify a meatless diet: by health, economy, ethics or religion?

Each question limits the sources to a handful you can read closely, and each asks “why” as well as “what”. If you are stuck between a topic and a question, AllEssay’s guide to narrowing a research paper topic into a question you can argue has a useful set of tests for whether a question is too broad, too narrow or unsupported.

Reading for evidence

Once you have the books, read them in a fixed order. Start with the front matter: title page, publisher, date and preface, which tell you who is speaking and to whom. Then read the table of contents as data: what gets a whole chapter, what gets a line? Then read a sample of recipes closely, noting ingredients, quantities, equipment and assumptions about labour. Finally look for what is missing. A 1906 hostess’s book with no budget dishes, or a 1912 budget book with no entertaining, tells you about its readers by silence.

Record exact quotations with the edition and page. When you compare books, compare like with like: a soup chapter against a soup chapter, a preface against a preface.

Counting helps more than people expect. How many of a book’s recipes call for canned goods, for gas, for an ice-cream freezer, for a servant? In Practical Cooking and Serving, a whole run of chapters on table decoration, lighting and service à la Russe assumes a household with help in the dining room; a budget booklet of the same decade assumes none. A simple tally in a spreadsheet turns an impression into evidence you can show, and it often finds the pattern you had not noticed while reading.

Watch the dates, too. A book first printed in 1902 and reissued in 1919 may carry seventeen-year-old advice in a wartime binding. Use the date of the text you are quoting, and say when a later printing kept something unchanged; that persistence can be a finding in itself.

Sources to read alongside

Cookbooks argue best in company. Pair them with sources that record practice: diaries and letters, household account books, restaurant and hotel menus, newspaper food columns and advertisements, and government bulletins of the same years. The Library of Congress and state archives hold many of these, and newspaper archives will show you how a cookbook’s ideas were advertised and argued over.

And read the secondary literature before you write the conclusion. Food history is an established field with its own debates about domestic science, regional cooking and wartime food. Your three cookbooks will mean more once you know which of those debates they speak to.