“It was something of a shock that I woke up one morning and found myself a collector of cookery books. I am not sure which seemed the more extraordinary, – that there should be cookery books to collect, or that I should be collecting them.” Elizabeth Robins Pennell
If I asked you to guess how many cookbooks I own, what would your guess be? I don’t mean just historical cookbooks; I mean the grand total of my physical cookbooks, on my shelves, in my apartment. Think about it before you read further. The number is quite high, but not as high as other people’s and, in my defense, cookbooks and food are sort of my job. At least that’s what I tell myself; that’s how I justify buying more when I can barely shelve the ones I already have. At least I wasn’t surprised that I was a cookbook collector, unlike Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
Leave a comment. Tell me what your guess was.
The number according to an online catalog I keep up to date, is five hundred and thirteen five hundred and eighteen. In reality though the number is higher because there are cookbooks I own that don’t exist in the database I use (EatYourBooks). When my cookbooks come up in conversation, people wonder how I keep so many in my apartment. The answer is simple, near floor to ceiling IKEA Billy bookshelves in my bedroom, on my side of the bed. I have no wall space left and barely any walking room, but the silver lining is that I wake up every morning to the most wonderful sight of hundreds of cookbooks. I am thankful though that there are no earthquakes in New York City. Now I’m running out of space for cookbooks (and everything else, to be honest), and that’s a problem, by which I mean I need more space for cookbooks, not fewer cookbooks. I also need a much bigger income to afford that. A woman can dream.
I admit that however many cookbooks I own is not a normal amount and that I don’t cook from all of them. But cookbooks are not just for cooking. They are windows into other cultures, they are armchair travel aids, they are inspiration, they are education, they are historical records. As the dust jacket of one of Eric Quayle’s books described them, cookbooks “amuse, teach, mirror the social clime of the times in which they appear.” Besides, I am clearly far from the first person to be obsessed – let’s call it what it is – with cookbooks. Even when cookbooks were not as accessible as they are today, people were already collecting them and even writing about them.
In a very meta sort of way, there have been multiple books about cookbooks published over the last 130+ years. They range from simply talking about people’s love for cookbooks to annotated bibliographies about people’s collections and about cookbooks published more generally. There have also been books about cookbooks that make historical arguments. This is a chronological exploration of some of those books because, also in a meta sort of way, I am interested in what other people think about cookbooks and how they use them – or not – and I hope you find it as interesting as I do.1
Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. W. Carew Hazlitt, London, 1886.
Carew begins the book with an introduction tracing food and eating from ancient times to times more contemporary to him, although not chronologically. The first two sections of the book are dedicated to the food of the early English and to royal feasts. Then Carew dives into the cookery books themselves. While he does list books, he also gives commentary on their history and on the history of cookbook writing and publishing more generally. He notes a gap on cookbook publishing: “In fact, the first half of the seventeenth century did not witness many accessions to the store of literature on this subject. But from the time of the Commonwealth, the supply of works of reference for the housekeeper and the cook became much more regular and extensive.” The book also contains extracts from other recipe books, as well as discussions on diet, meals, and the kitchen.
My Cookery Books. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Boston, 1903.
This book, which is very much about the author’s collection, is delightful. Pennell is funny, witty, and confident. She’s very relatable, at least to me, and it is obvious that she had a visceral passion for cookbooks. Pennell tells us that she began collecting cookbooks when she agreed to write a column on cookery for a newspaper. She was completely in over her head and she knew it. Her only qualifications, she tells us, “were a healthy appetite and the honest love of a good dinner usually considered ‘unbecoming to the sex.’” She is also extremely quotable, but I’ll just give you this gem she gives us after going on about how her cookbook collection is the best one around: “There is also, I know, a Company of Cooks in the city of London, but I doubt if they own a book, or, for that matter, can claim a real cook in their ranks. Besides, so long as I have seen no other existing collection, I can continue to flatter myself that mine is unrivaled.” OK, maybe one more, on how she began collecting cookbooks even though the idea of collecting was not on her mind: “booksellers always manage to know you are collecting before you know it yourself. Catalogues poured in upon me, and I kept on buying all the cookery books that promised to be of use. Gradually they spread out into an imposing row on my desk; they overflowed to the bookshelves; they piled themselves up in odd corners; they penetrated into the linen closet, – the last place, I admit, the neat housekeeper should look for them. And yet, it was not until this summer that I went without a new gown, and carried off at Sotheby’s from the clutches of the dealer and the maws of the librarian, one of the first few editions of ‘good old Hannah Glasse’ […] that I realized what had happened, and then it was too late.” I see myself in Elizabeth Robins Pennell, minus Sotheby’s. The book closes with a bibliography of her collection, except for early manuscripts and for books after the 18th century. I counted 117.
Gastronomic Bibliography. Katherine Golden Bitting, San Francisco, 1939.
Like Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Bitting describes the early stages of her cookbook collecting as haphazard and based on nothing more than a cursory glance at the table of contents and quick gauge of helpfulness. She claims to have learned to be more discerning, and twenty years later her collection had “grown by small increments to more than three thousand titles,” many of them rare. The books in this bibliography, however, are not just her personal collection as far as I can tell. Unlike the other bibliography-style books in this article, Gastronomic Bibliography lists the books in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names. The ‘Anonymous” section lists the books by the title. Bitting also includes what we think of today as community cookbooks. She explains that “they are useful in following the development of sectional cookery.” The books span several languages and geographies.
American Cookery Books, 1742-1860. Waldo Lincoln and Eleanor Lowenstein, Worcester, 1954.
This book, published by Lowenstein in 1954, is based on, and expands upon, a bibliography published by Waldo Lincoln in 1929. Because of the nature of the main collection, which belonged to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), this book is about cookbooks printed in what is now the United States only. The AAS also limited their collection, at the time, to before the year 1914. In that year, the beginning of World War 1, Lincoln claims, the publication of cookery books increased considerably, as wars often do. She adds that “the American Civil War had a similar effect” on cookbooks but that, “unfortunately at the time, the substitution of wood pulp for rags in the manufacture of paper caused a great deterioration in the quality of the paper used in books intended for popular consumption. Cookery books increased in numbers but decreased in bibliographical value.” This was a factor in the decision to end this bibliography in 1860. Nevertheless, Lowenstein added about 250 titles within the book’s time frame, which starts in 1742. Some of the books come directly from collections, but others come from advertisements in newspapers and other sources and no copies were found in archives at the time the publication of the bibliography.
Old Cookbooks: An Illustrated History. Eric Quayle, New York, 1978.
This book is exactly what it sounds like, a pictorial trip through the history of cookbooks. According to the dust jacket, the book is “a chronicle of the first books to appear, the first ones to have a substantial sale, the ones that had a large social influence in their time […] and a general sampling of both typical and funny things” found in them. Rather than list books in the way of an annotated bibliography, Old Cookbooks is broken up in thematic and chronological chapters – eleven, to be precise – though the chronology sometimes overlaps. The book opens with “Boiled Sugar and Sucking Pig,” a chapter on ancient cookery, and closes with “The Beeton Era,” depicting 19th century cookbooks. One chapter is dedicated to American cookbooks, and opens with the observation that “although many of the housewives that victualed and fed the early pioneering families must have relied upon their own trusted collections of handwritten recipes, printed cookery books were almost unknown in North America during the first 150 years of her colonial history.” The book also contains recipes from various historical cookbooks.
The American Cookbook: A History. Carol Fisher, Jefferson, 2006.
Rather than a bibliography or someone’s love letter to their cookbook collection (although it does include a bibliography of notable American cookbooks), The American Cookbook is an in-depth study of the early days and evolution of cookbooks in the United States, beginning in the colonial era. Fisher explores how cookbooks, as products of their time, were often deeply enmeshed in social and cultural movements and events. One of the chapters deals with the birth, as it were, of community cookbooks, and another one tells us about the most influential cookbooks of the 20th century. The book is arranged in thematic chapters and is full of wonderful images to accompany the narrative.
A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Henry Notaker, Oakland, 2017.
This is the most scholarly of all the books in this list. It was even published by a university press, which means the book went through a peer review process. Like The American Cookbooks, this is not a bibliography or about someone’s collection. Instead, it is a serious look at cookbooks in their historical context and cookbooks as a literary genre. In Notaker’s words, the book “outlines a literary history and book history of European and Western cookbooks.” Part 1 examines the two main roles in a cookbook: the cook and the writer, who are not necessarily the same person. Part 2 deals with the cookbook itself, both form and content, and Part 3 engages with the relationship between the cookbook and the world. In the process, it examines issues like class, medicine, religion, dietary choices, pleasure, gender, and even nationalism. On the latter, when talking about national culinary traditions, Notaker posits that it is perhaps “possible to talk about an ‘imagined culinary community,’” to describe the cultural and often artificial constructs of national cuisines or national dishes. Here, Notaker gives a nod to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” which, again, are social constructs that stand in for nations.
My Cookbook Passion: Culinary History and Adventure in Exploring My Collection. Pamela Kure Grogan, Las Vegas, 2021.
This book is an excellent combination of memorabilia, storytelling, and the author’s love of her cookbook collection. It is sort of a bibliography, but beautifully illustrated with extensive notes on each book. Grogan’s approach is to tell us a brief history of each cookbook, including how it came to be in the first place. As such, though this is absolutely an ode to her collection, a considerable amount of research went into writing this book. The organization is thematic, with chapters like “Reaching for the Stars,” about celebrity cookbooks; “The Jovial Ghosts of Dining,” about cookbooks from famous restaurants that no longer exist; and “Social Studies,” which deals with Black-American cookbooks, working class cookbooks, and sex and cookbooks among other themes. The book, which also contains recipes, closes with a section on two food writers: André Simon and M.K. Fisher, and culinary miscellanea from the author’s life. In the latter sections, Grogan reveals she has a large collection of food advertising pamphlets. Over 500, which take up 24 binders. But more importantly, at the time the book went to print, she owned over 2500 cookbooks.
Now, won’t somebody pay me to write about my cookbook collection?!?!?
Interesting Things I’ve Been Reading and Watching Lately
The El Paso-Ciudad Júarez Borderlands and the Making of “Authentic” Mexican Food, from
Food Safety: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (explicit)
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This was so fun to read. My guess was two hundred cookbooks and food-related books. I am sure I’m under-estimating that number, and now you’ve inspired me to face the truth and catalog them.
I love that you not only collect cook books but books about cookbooks! I agree wholeheartedly that cookbooks reflect our culture, our social history and are historical records. They can also be very sentimental - I love to see notes my late husband wrote in his cookbooks.
Have you read Feast: A History of Grand Eating by Roy Strong? Sorry to your groaning bookshelves.