The humble literature of complex civilizations

Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies. The existence of cookbooks presupposes not only some degree of literacy, but often an effort on the part of some variety of specialist to standardize the regime of the kitchen, to transmit culinary lore, and to publicize particular traditions guiding the journey of food from marketplace to kitchen to table. Insofar as cookbooks reflect the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the term cuisine, they are likely, as Jack Goody has recently argued, to be representations not only of structures of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes, but of class and hierarchy (1982).

From "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India" by Arjun Appadurai. The paper itself deals with class in India but this first paragraph is good to quote here for the clarity of the way it states the anthropological angle on cookbook research.

Charting the geographical and numerical spread of ingredients from 29 historic cookbooks

 
From various places (Gutenberg, Archive, Bit-Torrent) I have collected the full text of 29 cookbooks published between 1390 and 2010.

I will not bother you here with the full list, but the earliest is the Forme of Cury (1390) and the latest is the Paleo Diet cookbook (2010). In between there are classics like The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Beeton (1859), A guide to modern cookery by Auguste Escoffier (1907) and the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver (1999). I have tried to find books evenly spaced through the years and have cleared them as best as I could from non-intentional ingredients. Book by book I fed all of them into Map you Recipe and collected the raw numbers that are used to make the graph above.

It maps the number of ingredients (vertical axis) for 29 books identified by year of publication (horizontal axis). The green top line tracks total number of ingredients recognized, two lines track how many of those are from the old or the new world and one line indicated from how many of the 15 food categories Map your Recipe uses ingredients are drawn from. 

Here are some observations that I think are fascinating. 

- Over time cookbooks have an increasing list of potential ingredients.  

- The big change comes about 1600 when the number of ingredients sharply rises. 

- It takes to about 1650 when produce from the Americas start to be seriously introduced to the larder.

- The food stuffs from the Americas on there own or not enough to explain the sudden increase in 17th century.

- From 1700 onwards the total use of ingredients goes up (130 max) and down (61 min) but it never goes down enough to come near the level of 1658 (41 ingredients) which at that time is the record.  

- The first cookbook with more than a hundred ingredients dates from 1851, but this remains an exceptional number for a long time.

- The Paleo-diet cookbook has the highest total number of ingredients. It is ironic that a so-called 'caveman diet' seems intent on using as much agricultural crops at it can.

- Nigella Lawson in 2007 uses 29 more ingredients than J. Oliver in 1999.

There are a few caveats. In an earlier post I did the same for 15 books searching only for those fruits and vegs that Vavilov was able to trace to a specific food hearth. In the mean time I have also added many other food stuffs that are known to originate from the old or the new world but without the specificness of the Vavilov list. The problem with the additional list is that it is in potential infinite. This is even true when you exclude meat and fish as Map you Recipe does. So you don't know what is missing even though I expect it to pick up 99% of the most common ingredients. 

This graph is not intended to be the final word nor does it make claims for extreme precision. It is meant as an illustration for general trends in food over time and I think it is very revealing. 

Weed cookbook

Found on Ebay, if the postage wasn't so prohibitive (22+dollars) I would make a bid.

The Eskimo Cook Book

The Eskimo Cook Book is a collection of recipes brought together by children at the Shismaref Day School in 1952 and published as a booklet by the 'Alaska Crippled Children's Association'. It's a lovely little book filled with 'simple but honest' dishes that give a unique insight in how food is also culture. It is all the more remarkable (and revealing) for the way the children wrote the recipes down, as you can see for yourself below. I particularly like the way the letters on the cover are left to dry like pieces of salmon. The pictures are not all equally sharp but you can read them, click to enlarge.
 











 

United foragers against olive (oil)

"Øllebrød" and frothed milk

A while ago I caught the finalists of Masterchef professional 2010, a BBC cooking competition, visiting Copenhagen's Noma. And so I learned about the best restaurant in the world of 2010 as voted by the chefs themselves. It is not easy to miss that Noma is something special: the chefs are not fat bastards but healthy looking, cool dude designer types. Head Chef René Redzepi has as a cardinal rule that at least 1/3 of all dishes should consist of foraged goods and his explanation makes perfect ecological sense in the present but are also typical in the wider sense of foraging as an activity of reinhabitation, skill, concentration and awareness.

All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef. I know it has shaped me. If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate. But it's more than that. When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.       

Central to the argument of the great forage revival is that it reintroduces an ancient practise wiped out by the aggressive spread of the culture of agriculture. Redzepi tells us that choosing local, foraged, ingredients also means breaking with the great tradition of fine dining: fat! And this is no surprise: not health or food security but calories were the killer app of agriculture. 

So when we came to open Noma, with our commitment to a new style of cooking that turned away from the otherwise terrific classical French repertoire – no olives or its oil, no tomatoes unless briefly in season, no bulb garlic – to something distinctive and regional, it made sense that a lot of our ingredients should be those we could find, not least because they are so available. That's the beauty of Copenhagen. You can just go into its parks and find the likes of wild garlic and yellow star of Bethlehem and march violets, all of which we use in our dishes.

Another returning fascinating point is answered as well. How do you actually learn to forage. Mostly by being instructed. The 'rare character' mentioned at the end, one of those persons with real knowledge doesn't sound open to the suggestion of  sharing his sites with the internet dummies finding edibles for free the augmented foraging easy way. There is a discussion about this earlier.  

Other things came from further away. I studied recipe books and nature books, learned about wood sorrel and ground elder and particular kinds of seaweed to be plucked from the shore. We also developed a network of professional foragers. We have one man who has been doing it for decades. He is one of those rare characters, with teeth that go in all directions and a book in which he has been keeping notes about the weather and the locations of particular mushrooms since the 1970s. This information he keeps to himself, like it was the recipe for Coke. They are his life, his treasure. 

The pictures below are from a Flickr Photoset that contains many more goodies. The quotes are taken from an interview with The Guardian in April 2010. 

Blueberries and pine

Cook it Raw