Last month’s Bergen News article by Noreen Olsen, in which she described her parents making doughnuts, inspired me to finally write about a topic that I’ve been ruminating on for some time. I was mulling the idea over, when my mom told me she’s been searching through family cookbooks for her brothers’ favourite Christmas cookie recipe. That settled it; it was time to examine what cookbooks can tell us about family and social history.

Like many people, I have a collection of recipes copied from various women in my family. Often these foods are tied to a specific person, such as Granny’s Biscuits, or Aunt Nada’s Carrot Cake. Other recipes are for particular occasions, like Dad’s Birthday Cake (chocolate chiffon), Grandma’s Easter Chocolates, or Santa Claus Candy. In addition, certain relatives gave me cookbooks in which they wrote a dated message. In some families, treasured cookbooks are passed down, inscribed with names that record the generations. Thus, my kitchen bookshelf, like that in so many other homes, contains a personal history of family events and relationships.

Cookbooks also place a family within the history of the wider community. At the local level, books were often created by sets of (primarily) women to raise money for charities. My mom has several cookbooks from her hometown to which various family members contributed. This illustrates how her family fit within assorted neighbourhood circles. One’s ethnic group is also reflected by recipes, and there are a few German language books on my shelf that my husband inherited from his mother. I recall reading somewhere that traditional foods are the aspect of culture that is most resistant to change and assimilation by the dominant society.

On a broader scale, a recipe book is also social history, recording what life was like when it was published. The initial clue comes from the title, often showing the intended audience. The cooking instructions indicate the level of basic knowledge and the types of tools the reader was expected to have. The ingredients list reveals the kinds of foods readily available at the time. Illustrations also give clues to cooking techniques and equipment. Any advertisements reflect the book’s era as well.

My first cookbook, Kitchen Kapers for Kids by “Penny Powers” of the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, is an excellent example. This thin promotional booklet in its jaunty yellow cover, although devoid of a publication date, screams 1970s through its use of canned veggies, cartoon characters, safety tips, and the message to kids that it is fun to surprise their hard-working Mom with breakfast in bed on her day off.

This fall, I discovered another resource about the social history of cookbooks. To relieve the tedium of chopping pound after pound of crabapples, I listened to a Library and Archives Canada podcast. I later read through their online Canadian cookbook exhibit. I learned that the oldest cookbook held in the national archives was written by Hannah Glasse, published in 1762  (in its seventh edition), and titled The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy: which far exceeds any thing yet published. The earliest cookbook written and published in Canada is La cuisinière canadienne, which was published in Montreal in 1840. Other historic cookbooks can be found through searches on Internet Archive.

Early cookbooks required a base of knowledge and experience beyond what we are used to, as they had little in the way of detailed instructions. Initially, recipes did not even give precise measurements of ingredients, since standardized measures were not used until the 1820s. However, experienced cooks of recent eras may not use precise measurements, either. My Granny and her biscuit recipe are typical of this, as she relied on the feel of the dough to gage the proportion of ingredients.

The difference in ingredients themselves is also noticeable when comparing historic and modern recipes. For instance, very old recipes use vocabulary we may never have heard before, such as loaf sugar, an early form of granulated sugar. As well, standard ingredients of today may not have been invented yet. A case in point is baking powder which was not created until 1843; before this, cakes relied on eggs to trap bubbles of air. Some ingredients, though known in the past, may have been so hard to acquire that they were not in common use; vanilla and chocolate are examples. Instead, cakes were flavoured with liquors or fruits.

Baking times and temperatures, which are recipe requirements today, are absent from early records. Historically, these relied on the cook’s experience, since hearths and, later, wood-fuelled stoves did not allow precise temperature control.

So, studying cookbooks from past eras can tell us quite a bit about what daily life was like. In widely published cookbooks, instructions give a general idea of the current state of technology for food preservation and preparation, while ingredients indicate trading patterns and transportation systems. Locally published cookbooks reflect community organization and ethnicity. Family recipes detail kinship, family traditions, and how the family fit within the broader community.

Noreen’s story about doughnuts brought back one of my earliest memories: my grandmother lifting doughnuts from the vat of oil, patting them dry, and rolling them in fragrant cinnamon sugar. We lived with her during the summer I was six, and I distinctly recall the melt in your mouth sweetness of those still warm doughnuts. I’m not sure I ever had them again, and Mom never made them, but those doughnuts are a vivid sensory trace of my past linking me to my maternal grandmother.

Food, while a necessity of life, is often so much more: an expression of love, belonging, and pleasure. Take another look at your kitchen shelf. You, too, could find a record of meaningful traditions and cultural delicacies hiding in a dog-eared cookbook.

This article was originally printed in the BERGEN NEWS and is being reprinted with permission.