Food History

Publications by major libraries are often worth looking out for. The Huntingdon Library, for instance, has published The Cornucopia, Being a kitchen entertainment and cookbook, containing Good Reading and Good Cookery from more than 500 years of Recipes, Food Lore &c. as conceived and expounded by the Great Chefs & Gourmets of the Old and New Worlds between the years 1390 and 1899 now compiled and presented to the public in a single handsome and convenient volume. The title describes it perfectly. I wouldn’t like to have to remember it all for a quiz night, though.

What amuses me about this volume is that it is meant to be like the fun pre-twentieth century compilations. It has a bit of that feel, in page set-up, in the choice of illustrations, and so on.

Except that it reads a bit like blogged selections from the old recipe books, brought together in one volume. This isn’t a problem. Blogging, after all, is our replacement for the newspaper snippet and the scrapbook and the almanac and the essay collection. Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman have measured the modern sensibility rather well. In fact, they have done extraordinarily well, because this book first came out in 1973, well before the advent of blogland.

This post is not a book review. It’s a passing remark about how blogs have taken a particular kind of printed material and claimed to make it new. It’s a statement of the joy of continuity in the written word and especially the written word of culinary history.

Cookbooks and household compilations more than most other books are infinitely bloggable. I could give you a recipe a day from my grandmother’s cookbook or I could take my 1848 Dictionary of Practical Receipts and put it up here, section by section and it would fit perfectly. There’s something about our cultural shaping of recipes and their surrounds that perfectly fits the blogosphere and that has meant a near-seamless transfer in form between books such as this and how we blog recipes and thoughts of the culinary past.

The shapes of culture are so very cool. Excuse me while I go away to explore my library and find more blog-ancestors.