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Friday, March 29, 2024

Matwick Musings: Cookbooks: Print and Digital

When you need a recipe, where do you turn? We have many options — cookbooks, magazines, newspaper columns, food websites, television cooking shows and even food products themselves (cereal boxes, chocolate chip bags, etc.).

We read about food and watch the Food Networkeven as we seek convenience and time-saving tips for meals and devote less time to cooking. Equally paradoxical is that in the age of increasingly digital everything, print cookbooks are the only genre of books to maintain sales after 9/11 and to increase in sales during the recession in 2009.

Yet Laura Shapiro, culinary historian, argues in “Something in the Oven” that the presence of a cookbook in a household does not necessarily reflect that it is actually used, but that does not diminish a cookbook’s literary value. “Popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period, about the expectations and aspirations that hovered over the stove and the dinner table, and about the range of material and technical influences that affected home cooking.” Cookbooks are more than a how-to manual or source of entertainment.

So, why do we still buy cookbooks? The Internet offers free recipes, allows for customization, and can be easily shared with websites like Food52and Allrecipesthat provide a social, recipe-networking platform. We are able to look up recipes on all our devices throughout our day at  anytime and anywhere. Recipes have become a seamless experience and a part of our lifestyle.

Yet, recipes on the Internet are malleable, resulting in a sense of fleetingness. When recipes are posted anonymously, the ties to the origins are lost, and the lack of personal connection takes away from the potential and the emotional fulfilment of recipes. Links are sometimes broken, websites are continually updated and searches do not always yield the same results. And there are so many recipes available that it can be overwhelming and hard to make a decision. To make a recipe for poached eggs, Google brought up over 1.5 million recipes! Which one do you pick?

On the other hand, cookbooks provide a physicality and are a finite, bound text, offering a sense of permanence. Perhaps the most tangible expression of the connection between a cookbook and a family is the family cookbook, a handwritten collection of recipes passed down from generation to generation, usually from mother (or dad, if you’re lucky) to daughter.

As leading social historian at the University of Pennsylvania Janet Theopano argues, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends and groups of people either still alive or passed away. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While we are lucky that our Grandma Marie is still alive, when we make her clam dip served with potato chips one day, we will be reminded of her and connect with her on a personal and emotional level.

We need not decide which form is better as cookbooks and online forms of recipes mutually benefit one another and ultimately, both encourage cooking at home. Cookbooks are becoming e-books and offering accompanying web sites and apps. The 11th edition of “Betty Crocker Cookbook,”for instance, released an e-book version alongside the printed version in 2011.

At the same time, food bloggers strive to secure book deals. The wildly popular food blogger Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen became even more established and recognized internationally with her cookbook debut in 2012 which earned her many weeks as a national bestseller.

We can conclude that cookbooks are a more trustworthy source for recipes that work — It must be good enough to be printed. Yet to survive in this increasingly digitized world, cookbooks need to be adaptable in order to suit different lifestyles. Good recipes need quality control, testing and careful editing in order to endure time and any format — print or digital.

For more reading, refer to Laura Shapiro’s (2004) “Something from the oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America” and Janet Theopano’s (2002) “Eat my words: Reading women’s lives through the cookbooks they wrote.”

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