Write a paper of at least 1,000 words analyzing your chosen cookbook as a primary source on culinary, social, and cultural history. Using pithy quotations from the text, discuss how the author’s views on the cultural meanings of indigeneity, region, nation,
Write a paper of at least 1,000 words analyzing your chosen cookbook as a primary source on culinary, social, and cultural history. Using pithy quotations from the text, discuss how the author’s views on the cultural meanings of indigeneity, region, nation, and cosmopolitanism as well as other social categories such as gender, race, and class, where appropriate.
In discussing the culinary history, think about what the recipes and other textual material can tell us about the basic elements of a cuisine, including staple ingredients, cooking techniques, consumption rules, flavour principles, and infrastructure of food production and marketing.
Be sure to pull all of this material together within a single thesis statement (underline or italicize it, please). As with the previous paper, you can format your bibliography and citations according to any accepted style.
https://d.lib.msu.edu/fa/19#page/1/mode/2up Link to book
Cookbooks are neglected as information sources and teaching tools in academic libraries, especially for undergraduate learners. Approachable but complex primary sources, they can be examined as a records of people’s food habits, as a window on the authors or their societies and cultures, or as texts with rhetorical aims involving more than just cooking and eating.
This study surveys the literature on the use of cookbooks in scholarship and pedagogy, especially in the context of interdisciplinary food studies. It also explains their relevance for the library or archives classroom, both as potential research sources and as tools for teaching primary source literacy skills, and the common barriers to their collection and discovery.
Finally, it outlines uses for and approaches to teaching with cookbooks and offers examples of the author’s experience doing so in a special collections setting.
Cookbooks are rich personal and social texts, giving accounts of the whys and hows of our food traditions and, through them, our histories and cultures. While it is tempting to relegate them to the domain of the public library, catering to the practical information needs of the lifelong learner, they are increasingly prevalent in academic libraries as well, often in special collections.
In recent decades, cookbooks have become vital research tools, spurred on by the growth of the interdisciplinary field of food studies. Cookbooks can be evaluated as texts or mined for the information they reveal about their creators and the communities and cultures in which they were created.
They provide multiple points of analysis, from their cover art, prefatory material, and organization to the recipes themselves: ingredients, technologies, cooking methods, and instruction format.
In addition to their malleability for research, cookbooks are well positioned to introduce students to the evaluation and use of primary sources, in courses grounded in foodways as well as those that are not.
As scholarly information sources, cookbooks are versatile, multifaceted, and approachable. Despite this, student learners, especially undergraduates, might not think to use them in their academic work, and instructors may fail to incorporate them in research courses at this level. In some cases, neither students nor instructors are even aware such sources are useful to them or that they are part of an academic library’s collection.
Though studies based on the analysis of cookbooks proliferate in multiple disciplines, including interdisciplinary food studies, they are not well explored in the scholarship of teaching and learning and do not appear in the library and archives literatures.
Cookbooks deserve a more prominent place in special collections classrooms: as useful primary sources to suggest to student researchers and as tools to help students develop critical thinking skills and practice source analysis.
Based on my research with cookbooks and grounded in a broad review of the literature, I offer insights about how they may be used to enrich the undergraduate learning and research experience. I also reflect on my experience teaching with cookbooks in four specific courses.