Food on the page
Subtitle: cookbooks and American culture
By: Megan J. Elias
Publisher: PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780812249170
Subjects: Food writing; Cookbooks; Food; Food habits; American Cooking; History
Description: "In Food on the Page, the first comprehensive history of American cookbooks, Megan J. Elias chronicles cookbook publishing from the early 1800s to the present day. Following food writing through trends such as the Southern nostalgia that emerged in the late nineteenth century, the Francophilia of the 1940s, countercultural cooking in the 1970s, and today's cult of locally sourced ingredients, she reveals that what we read about food influences us just as much as what we taste. Examining a wealth of fascinating archival material—and rediscovering several all-American culinary delicacies and oddities in the process—Elias explores the role words play in the creation of taste on both a personal and a national level. From Fannie Farmer to The Joy of Cooking to food blogs, she argues, American cookbook writers have commented on national cuisine while tempting their readers to the table. By taking cookbooks seriously as a genre and by tracing their genealogy, Food on the Page explains where contemporary assumptions about American food came from and where they might lead"--Dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-280) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Words About Food; title: The Best-Fed People in the World : American Cookbooks in the Nineteenth Century; title: An Appetite for Innovation : Cookbooks Before the Second World War; title: Gourmet Is a Boy : Midcentury Cookbooks and Food Magazines; title: Mastering the Art of American Cooking : Julia Child and American Cookbooks; title: Oppositional Appetites : Cookbooks and the Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s; title: The Palate of Personality : Chefs and Cookbooks at the End of the Twentieth Century; title: Origin Stories : A New Discourse in Twenty-First-Century Cookbooks; title: Epilogue. What Should We Read for Dinner?