Description: Cookbooks offer a unique and valuable way to examine American life. Far from being recipe compendiums alone, cookbooks can reveal worlds of information about the daily lives, social practices, class aspirations, and cultural assumptions of people in the past. With a historical introduction and contextualizing annotations, this fascinating historical compilation of excerpts from five Civil War-era cookbooks presents a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban north of the 1860s United States.
Brief description:
Helen Zoe Veit is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She specializes in American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the history of food and nutrition. She is the author of Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, and general editor of the American Food in History Series.
Review Quotes: A key moment in American culinary history is brought to life by readable, authoritative essays and excerpts from contemporary cookbooks. Fascinating.
--Rachel Laudan, author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History