Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England's Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks

Abstract

As a child who learned to cook at her grandmother’s knee and was given free rein in the kitchen, cooking inevitably became an abiding interest for me, as did cookbooks. But it took 50 years for me to begin to think of the texts in archaeological terms, to see them as assemblages, with dates and contexts, terminus post quems, chronologies, or genealogies, and to realize that the books themselves were agents of change as much as sources of information. While trying to untangle their intricacies, what came to mind was that the texts shared elements in common with New England gravestones. On the one hand, like gravestones, cookbooks can be analyzed and reanalyzed using different approaches. On the other, their numbers are few, and they are more complex artifacts, speaking to all rites of passage in a community’s life, rather than simply to death. Cookbooks Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England’s Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks