How to read Cookbooks

Here are two interesting papers on how to engage with historic cookbooks by historian Barbara Wheaton. One is called: A Structured Approach to Reading Historic Cookbooks, the other is Finding Real Life In Cookbooks: The Adventures Of A Culinary Historian.

She especially has my attention when she writes about how to approach ingredient-lists and what questions can be asked about them:

Cookbooks tell us more about the repertory of ingredients than anything else. An inventory of the foodstuffs called for in a single cookbook can be compared with a list of commonly used Western foods. Thus, one can get a sense of how much variety in the diet there may be in the course of a year, and how opulent or impoverished the kitchen addressed by a particular work may be. When seasonal availability is taken into account, even a long list of ingredients may not be enough to prevent inadequate variety in the depth of winter, or in the *starving season* of springtime. The list may well begin to reveal how the food is obtained. Some books are plainly rural, while others are urban. Amelia Simmons, in her American Cookery, begins her discussion of peas with recommendations about what varieties to plant, while Eliza Acton, writing in her Modern Cookery, is concerned with helping the housewife not to be cheated by her greengrocer. Urban cookbooks are much more likely to measure food quantities by price -take 3d. worth of salt fish- or -a punnet of strawberries- rather than by amount. The rural kitchen is supplied by a flock of poultry in the barnyard, by the kitchen garden, by barter with local people, and by hunting, fishing, and foraging. The urban kitchen is visited by a multitude of ambulant vendors who sell seasonal foods, and herd flocks of goats (ready to be milked at the door), as well as meat pies and other baked goods. Street markets, covered markets, and shops bring a much wider variety of ingredients to the city dweller than to his or her country cousin. It must be added that, by the nineteenth century, there is a much greater concern with the adulteration of foods in the cities. A more general question must be asked: What proportions of the most commonly-used foodstuffs are obtained within and outside of the
cash economy?

The ingredients repertory displays economic and geographic patterns and raises questions such as: What are the points of origin of different food plants and animals? How long have they been present in the region represented by the cookbook? Which are the luxury ingredients, which are the staples, and which are the foods of the poor, or famine foods?

Here, I should point out a caveat: the mere mention of an ingredient does not guarantee its availability. In the past, as today, some cookbook writers seem to feel obliged to call for esoteric ingredients to demonstrate how recondite are their tastes. By the nineteenth century, the repertory expands: canal transportation, then the railroads, and finally steamboats greatly improve the selection of foodstuffs available in most parts of Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America. Pineapple and coconut, for example, are featured in Eliza Leslie's cookbooks published in Philadelphia in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By shortening the time spent in transit, the railroads in particular did much to improve the quality of foods sold in urban markets.

Some words on Darwinian Gastronomy

'Darwinian Gastronomy: why we use spices' (1999, PDF-link) by Sherman and Billing is a nice and early example of an attempt to use statistical analysis of cookbooks to reveal deeper patterns about what we eat and why. The paper theorizes that there is an evolutionary benefit to eating spices: "by cleansing food of pathogens before consumption, spice users contribute to the health, longevity and fitness of themselves, their families and their guests." There is more disease in the tropics and this is also where most spices are added to food, or so the paper seems to argues. Personally I think the argument runs the risk of putting the horse behind the carriage. Spices predominately grow in tropical areas and it makes sense to expect that this is where they eat them most.

There are some very nice graphs showing spice-use in 36 countries and I can easily appreciate how much data (93 cookbooks) went into making them. But we are never told what those books were. How can someone who knows about these things ever make a judgement on how soundly food traditions/cuisines are represented? A cookbook is not a neutral source, but a vehicle of someone's dietary ideology. Something advertised as traditional may be less than a week old, something advertised as national may be produced by a radical fringe. What and where is the baseline? The paper, in its conclusion, recommends cookbooks "from different eras" as "a written record of our coevolutionary races against foodborne diseases." This I seriously doubt: the history of cookbooks is not old enough to pick up deep evolutionary changes. If we do eat spice as an antidote to unclean food we, in the West, could do without them, our ever growing love for spicy food shows the reverse.

A related paper explains why "vegetable recipes are less spicy" (PDF-link) from which we learn a debatable assumption made in the other paper: it treats fish as a meat.


 

Food pairing / gastronomy with a telescope [Part Two]

Earlier we have looked at the possibility of using foodpairs as a yardstick by which bodies of recipes can be compared for their (dis)similarity. The aim is to so look at cuisines in order to see how Asian cuisines differ from Western ones, how Asian cuisines differ internally and how the cuisines of the new world in turn relate to the ones from the old world.

This is interesting to pursue for the way it might corroborate larger historic explanations of how cuisines have developed. China developed in isolation much longer than any other civilization in the old world, is its cooking also more singular? India has been invaded several times and its food is very much a product of its own cultures clashing with its Muslim conquerors, does that make it stand out from the other Asian cuisines? Read Rachel Laudan's book Cuisine and Empire for the bigger historic picture.

In practice when using the word cuisine we are actually comparing English language books written for an audience of English speaking home cooks; an important difference. 

The number of foodpairs a recipe generates increases exponentially with the number of ingredients. A typical cookbook (and the ones we use here are all modest one) yields anywhere between 700 and 2500 pairs, the number of connections when comparing three books is large and a really meaningful way to visualize a foodpair comparison we have not yet found. Instead we have turned to using the Jaccard Index, a simple formula for comparing similarity in datasets.  If two book are absolutely similar (a book compared with itself) the index is 1, if the books are completely dissimilar the index is 0. So how higher the number how greater the similarity. Let's look at how Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef compares to 12 cookbooks representing many styles and cuisines.

 

The Horizontal line is most important as it shows the similarity (in %, Jaccard index*100) between Oliver and the book being compared. The vertical line gives the total number of unique foodpairs in both books. According to this Oliver is most similar to other UK TV chefs Nigella Lawson (27%) and Gordon Ramsay (34%). He is equally similar to books on French, Mexican, Brazilian and Greek food. He is least similar to the two Chinese cookbooks (8%). The fcat these two Chinese cookbooks are equally dissimilar is important: it shows they are themselves similar, as you would expect. 

Here is the graph comparing Vietnamese, Thai, Indian (Madhur Jaffrey) and two Chinese (one by Ken Hom) cookbooks. 

Indian/Chinese has the least similarity, Chinese/Chinese most but with 16% which puts perspective on the 34% similarity between Oliver and Ramsay.

Here is the graph comparing 13 cookbooks with each other, it is large to make it legible (click to enlarge). A rough guess is that 10-15% comparison is average. The 20+ similarity for UK celebrity chefs is striking but further work will have to decide how striking.

It is much easier to compare cookbooks on the presence of ingredients alone, there is much less data. When doing this for the same books as above the graph below is created. Or check here for a interactive one.The numbers are different, the Jaccard-index gets much higher (54% ingredient similarity between the top-scoring duo Ramsay and Oliver), but the overall shape of these two graphs is recognizably similar, especially when you factor in the difference in scale. This is good news because proper food pair data (recipe for recipe) is hard to create while creating ingredient lists for books is exactly what foodmap does.