Food on the Page : Cookbooks and American Culture.

ISBN:

9780812294033

Title:

Author:

Elias, Megan J.

Personal Author:

Elias, Megan J.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 pages)

Contents:

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction. Words About Food -- 1 The Best-Fed People in the World: American Cookbooks in the Nineteenth Century -- 2 An Appetite for Innovation: Cookbooks Before the Second World War -- 3 Gourmet Is a Boy: Midcentury Cookbooks and Food Magazines -- 4 Mastering the Art of American Cooking: Julia Child and American Cookbooks -- 5 Oppositional Appetites: Cookbooks and the Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s -- 6 The Palate of Personality: Chefs and Cookbooks at the End of the Twentieth Century -- 7 Origin Stories: A New Discourse in Twenty-First-Century Cookbooks -- Epilogue. What Should We Read for Dinner? -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z -- Acknowledgments.

Local Note:

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

Subject Term:

Cookbooks.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view book

Publication Date:

2017

Publication Information:

Philadelphia :

University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.,

2017.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
641.50973	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ON-DEMAND	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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. Examining a wealth of fascinating archival material, Elias explores the role words play in the creation of taste on both a personal and a national level.

Author Notes

Megan J. Elias is Associate Professor of the Practice and Faculty Coordinator in Gastronomy at Boston University. She is the author of numerous books, including Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews (2)

Booklist Review

More than just collections of recipes, cookbooks are a product of their times and offer a clear reflection of an era's cultural trends and attitudes. In this carefully researched book, Elias traces the history of American culinary publishing from antebellum days to the present. The author provides context for each development, such as early community cookbooks that sought to elevate social status, Age of Progress corporate cookbooks that extolled the virtues of new kitchen technology, and, post-WWII, the emergence of a gourmet movement fixated on French cuisine. Elias covers more-recent cookbook authors such as James Beard, Julia Child, and Edna Lewis, as well as essayists and food journalists like Ruth Reichl and Michael Pollan. Ultimately, the book ably shows the thread connecting each stage in cookbooks and convincingly demonstrates that as Americans found their footing and identity, first as a young nation and later as a global power, so did their foodways find confidence and develop their own voices.--Neumer Lara, Alison Copyright 2017 Booklist

Choice Review

In her fifth book about American food history, cultural historian Elias (Boston Univ.) uncovers the meaning and value placed on food that Americans communicated through cookbooks from the Colonial era to the 21st century. This is the first comprehensive history of American cookbooks to date. Elias shows particular fascination with the nostalgia for Southern cooking that emerged after the Civil War; American openness toward French culture and cuisine in the 1940s; the rise of feminist, vegetarian, and macrobiotic cooking in the 1970s; and the 21st-century obsession with local ingredients. She provides a complete list of special culinary collections and archives she visited while conducting her research and an extensive bibliography of cookbooks featured and cited in the book. Though she writes about Julia Child as the first major "celebrity chef" to impact American cooking and food culture, Elias seems to forget that Child became famous through her television show, not her cookbooks. With the rise of television and YouTube culinary celebrities, it is possible that other forms of media do more to shape contemporary American food culture than cookbooks do. Elias would have done well to address this evolution rather than propose that cookbooks have had universal popularity over time. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Rachel S. Wexelbaum, Saint Cloud State University