In the past decade, the source of guidance in our home kitchens has changed thanks to handy smartphones and tablets, with apps filled to the brim with recipes, and thousands of blogs written by home cooks ready to dish out advice. A question I’ve heard asked many times is: ‘how will technology impact cookbooks?’ Will they become obsolete, or will there always be space for food-stained volumes of recipes stacked on a kitchen shelf?
I love how Bee Wilson talks about recipes and cookbooks in an article The Pleasures of Reading Recipes, published in The New Yorker in July 2013. "Like a short story," she writes, "a good recipes can put us in a delightful trance… recipe stories of pretend meals. Don't be fooled by the fact that they are written in the imperative tense (pick the basil leaves, peel the onion). Yes, you might do that tomorrow, but right now, you are doing something else. As you read, your head drowsily on the pillow, there is no onion, but you watch yourself peel it in your mind's eye . . .". Ask any food lover what books lie on their bedside table, and you're almost guaranteed that at least one will be a cookbook.
Recipes, or "receipts" as they were once known, have been exchanged and recorded for thousands of years. The Yale Babylonian Collection is thought to include the world's oldest surviving recipes. Recipes for meat and vegetarian dishes, and a few stews, are written on three Akkadian tablets and are thought to be 5,000 years old.
From the classical world comes Apicius, a collection of Roman cookery recipes believed to date from the late fourth or early fifth century. It includes chapters titled "The Careful Housekeeper", "Birds" and "The Meat Mincer".
The modern prevalence of cookbooks was no doubt helped along by the development of the printing press in the 15th and 16th centuries, but it wasn’t until the Victorian era that printed cookbooks really came into their own. In an article about Victorians and domesticity on the bbc website, I read that “the Victorian era, 1837-1901, is characterised as the domestic age par excellence, epitomised by Queen Victoria, who came to represent a kind of femininity which was centred on the family, motherhood and respectability”.
Books such as Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) by Eliza Acton, and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton (published in volumes between 1857 and 1861) became handbooks for the Victorian housewife. In the US, American cook Fannie Farmer's The Boston Cooking School Cookbook became a bestseller in 1896 and featured nearly 2,000 of her recipes.
The Irish approach The tradition of women writing recipes for other women started long before the Victorian age. I've been reading through a collection of essays published earlier this year by the Royal Irish Academy, entitled Food and Drink in Ireland, edited by Elizabeth FitzPatrick and James Kelly.
One of the essays, “Whipt with a twig rod: Irish manuscript recipe books as sources for the study of culinary material culture c. 1660 to 1830” by food historian Madeline Shanahan includes an insight into the history of recipe sharing in Ireland’s aristocratic homes, and its connection to gender. Shanahan writes how the Georgian era promoted an ideal of a “genteel and meek” woman, so “writing became a central component in of house-wifery. A literate and yet passive mistress sitting at her desk was much more desirable than one with her sleeves rolled up sweating away in the kitchen, and so writing household manuals became a central component of this idealised femininity.”
Shanahan studied a number of private recipe collections from Irish homes, including those by the Inchiquin O’Briens of Co Clare, written by English women who married into this Gaelic noble family bringing their cultural traditions with them.
Shanahan references The Inchiquin Papers, a collection of domestic recipes and medical prescriptions started in around 1660 by Lady Frances Keightley, who was also Queen Mary II and Queen Anne's aunt. Shanahan writes: "It seems reasonable to say that recipe writing was an important signifier of class, culture and gendered identity for the new arrival [from England to Ireland], and that it subsequently became one for the elite classes already established here" and notes the lack of "expressly 'Irish' recipes" as an example of the Anglophone culinary culture of the elite. You can find out more about this volume of essays ria.ie.
Today, our recipe writers are from a much more diverse pool, from celebrity chefs to bloggers with a great story to supermodels with a love of food. In my kitchen, I often search the web for a quick idea to spark a supper planning session. For special meals for friends and family, which require thought and planning, I sit down with a few of my favourite cookbooks and let the ideas and creativity within them point me in the right direction. For me, there’ll always be room for a tactile cookbook in my home.
