What's Old is New Again, part 2
A revival in popularity for a favorite recipe format
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Last week, I thought about how we might reimagine our recipe writing and cooking practices by being more explicit about the recipe as a document situated within the context of our own lives.
I've talked before about the interaction between text and reader, namely how I bring my context to whatever I write as the author, you bring your own context to it as the reader, and as a result the same work can have very different impacts upon, or be interpreted very differently by, whoever happens to encounter it.
But there's another context to consider, too: Particularly with recipe writing, the format of our recipes can tell us a lot about a larger approach to cooking.
In the case of recipes, format and history are intertwined, something I've touched on before in various articles, but haven't really dove into deeply. My interest in the format of recipes emerged during my master's degree: I've talked in the past about Gervase Markham and how his book The English Housewife set me off on a journey that culminated in a project that was part recipe testing, part research, and part calligraphy and bookbinding (and really a lot of fun, too, the most important part!)
I was already an avid cook by this time, and like most of us learned by doing and by reading recipes. And, probably also like most of us, I hadn't really thought about the writing and formatting of recipes as a craft: An intentional choice of how to order and describe things, what to include or omit, etc. It wasn't until I encountered recipes that were not formatted the way I was accustomed to that I started to consider the structure of information (this information specifically, but any information we share) as intentional.
A lot of writing has been done on the history of cookbooks (e.g. Henry Notaker), but one part of that history that has especially interested me is the format of the recipes themselves.
There are plenty of other historical contexts to consider in recipe formatting, too: class and gender being two big ones, as well as publishing history. A not-terribly-nuanced cliff notes version of how this relates to cookbooks in western Europe and the US goes something like:
Early cookbooks appeared at a time when literacy was uncommon and often restricted to the wealthy, and less common for women than men. Many Early Modern cookbooks reflect the connection of class and literacy through menus and etiquette guidance focused on households who employed or enslaved serving staff.
The Industrial Revolution brought changes to printing and papermaking technologies, including our modern acidic (and thus very brittle) pulp paper, which replaced pricier rag paper, and faster bookbinding processes. This meant increased availability of books to wider swaths of the population during the Industrial Revolution (as well as wider literacy through various social programs and through public education).
While many people (particularly women) had limited access to written works prior to advances in mass publishing, books could now be written and marketed for more people: We see a rise in children's books, for example. Books written with women as their primary audience were rooted in gendered expectations about the reader's role in the home and in domestic life.
Recipe formats
That more people could access books increased the possibility of purchasing and using books on subjects one was unfamiliar with. Household manuals (which included household management as well as recipes) and receipt books (recipe books) were part of a popular larger genre of how to books, and the paragraph format of earlier recipe books would be easiest to interpret by someone with at least some passing knowledge of the kitchen.
But how could these books be made more useful, and their format easier to follow, for those less familiar with cooking? Could a book help its reader develop new skills in the kitchen?
We begin to see a shift in recipe format pre-Fannie Farmer, for example in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (Scotland, 1781). Glasse provides detailed steps and an index, laying the groundwork for today's standardized recipe format (and indexes in cookbooks). About a century later and a continent away, Fannie Farmer envisioned recipes that used exact measurements and temperatures: More a scientific, replicable set of instructions than a general guide.
This resulted in her 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The book was a revised and expanded version of the earlier Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (1890), and it was under Farmer’s revisions that the book saw its widespread success as the most popular cookery book of the day. The book appeared at a time when culinary culture was rapidly shifting: In the late 1800s, coal stoves were being replaced with gas, and modern conveniences like imported fruits and oils and prepackaged gelatin started to come onto the market.
Like many of her predecessors’ household manuals, Farmer includes other information beyond recipes themselves, to instruct readers in broader kitchen and household skills. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book has information about how to debone a bird, measure ingredients, and other information about the process of cooking.
Other cookbooks, typically classified as household manuals, from this time and earlier have information about a range of topics including growing food, manners, table setting, brewing, winemaking, and more. Farmer, on the other hand, is focused more on how to correctly prepare dishes, and her laser focus on preparation resulted in a new way to prepare food and to think about food.
The past and present
The cooking school's goal with this new format was to make cooking approachable and standardizable across households, creating a higher chance for success for those unfamiliar with a given technique.
I still appreciate our modern recipe format for that: Though outside of how I typically think about cooking in my daily practice, writing out a recipe forces me to think in steps, and to distill the most important information I need to convey about that dish.
There's (potentially) less room for variation with this approach, which may or may not matter to you depending how you like to cook. For some, it might feel constricting, for others, having some boundaries to experiment within can feel liberating.
Now we're going full circle, and seeing recipes as loose formulae written, as their predecessors were, to offer an outline of a technique (one of the better-known examples is NYT's No Recipe Recipes) rather than a more rigid set of instructions. With the modern vast landscape of food media, we're in a moment where both can be possible and marketable.
Looking to the past shows Nigella Lawson's writing in action: That we can, and should, have guidance that helps us build new skills and recall or recreate specific dishes, and that this can, and should, exist alongside our intuition.
It's another case of theory informing practice, and practice undergirding theory, each continuing to evolve and grow alongside each other. I love that we're in a moment where precise recipes can exist alongside more intuitive discussions of process (if you haven't listened already, I love this discussion between Alicia Kennedy and Lawson).
The new version of Joy of Cooking, one of my favorites on my bookshelf, is so because it blends the authors’ expertise with recipe writing that brings together the best of both worlds: clear ‘how and why’ instructions for readers, alongside with variations that allow for some experimentation, but experimentation rooted in an understanding of technique and process. I like, for example, that there are specific recipes (say for squash) but also just narrative guidance about the general process of cooking different types of squash.
As we encourage experimentation and culinary intuition, we're also encouraging a return to the written recipe's roots, and to the oral traditions before it that required flexibility and substitutions based on (for example) the seasonal availability of ingredients.
Next week, paid subscribers get my versions of some of the classic recipes from Farmer's cookbook.
P.S. In a moment of synchronicity, Alicia Kennedy wrote about recipe writing last week, a reminder that the context we put around our recipes: Those headnotes about process and associated memories, are the recipe, that without them the things we cook lose their meaning. I highly recommend giving it a read, if you haven’t already.
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