Various and Sundry Things about recipes

You, like every other creature on this planet, must eat to live. You, unlike any other creature on this planet, eat food prepared by one or several of a variety of cooking methods. You, unlike quite a few people on this planet, formulate and plan your cooking using unique forms of written communication called recipes, often compiled into collections called cookbooks. This is a cookbook that also includes ideas about cooking in a very large sense; cooking as one manifestation of human culture. Examining the recipes and food of a culture can lead to an exploration of a whole way of life. This book is about recipes and what comes before them to make them what they are. The germ seed of this book started with something very specific--how certain people cooked potatoes--then progressed through living conditions, agriculture, and social life, then ended with political problems and influence. It’s essential to talk about the unique and peculiar character of recipes at the beginning of this book.

Recipes are the textual manifestation of cooking culture. As I started this study I believed recipes were somehow set in stone, permanent, immovable. I thought if I just found the old texts I would receive a real and true picture of daily life in Ireland, Peru, Russia, the US. But as the study progressed, I felt compelled to come to terms with the nature and origin of recipes. Recipes as texts are like the words of a legend; they change over time. As they go through tellers/cooks, aspects of the text change so that each person is telling their own version. The more a story is told, the more versions develop and the more difficult it becomes to determine which is the authentic or original story/recipe. Discussing a "true" recipe or folktale becomes a minefield of conflicting sources. Some versions, like the folktales of the Brother’s Grimm or Julia Child’s crepes suzette, are told more often and establish more authority. But each includes the individuality of it’s author, as well as the essence of the tale.

Therefore, part of decoding a recipe is about knowing who’s writing it. The history of cookbook publication indicates that old recipes for potatoes might not touch what I want to touch. I wanted to deal with the daily life of peasants and the masses of the poor, but in the past only the elite wrote recipes and published them as cookbooks. Professional chefs, all men, wrote cookbooks about what they served kings, queens and nobles. The first cookbook written by a woman, Hannah Woolsey’s The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet published in 1670, maintained the practice of publishing special rich dishes for elite people (Du Vall, 1988). This presents a problem for me in collecting old potato recipes. Potatoes were mostly a food of the poor, so the cooks I’m interested in couldn’t read or write. But they did pass down their methods to their daughters and granddaughters, creating a traditional national cuisine that eventually modern daughters wrote down and published. Also, travelers and explorers took notes on the food they ate and published contemporary descriptions, if not recipes.

One of the most useful texts I found about recipes is called Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. It’s a collection of articles by all sorts of women edited by Arlene Voski Avakian. Sharon L. Jansen wrote an article called "Family Liked 1956: My Mother’s Recipes." Jansen’s mother turned recipes from a simple recitation of ingredients and procedures into an unique art form.

"For most, a recipe is a straightforward exercise in giving directions: a list of ingredients, step-by-step instructions, perhaps a few serving suggestions. But for my mother, a recipe presents an opportunity to experiment with composing as well as cooking. Her recipes are exercises in narration, description, analysis, even argument. For me, they raise questions about texts and context, about text and subtext, about textual authority and textual subversion. They are like nothing Betty Crocker ever imagined." (55-6)

Once, Jansen asked her mother for a recipe for cookies she remembered as a child. After several tries, her mother found the right recipe and sent it off in a letter describing when she first made the cookies, how the family liked them, significant occasions in which the cookies played a part, and tips for making them turn out best, ending with her typical "Have fun!" The recipe became an integral part of the the larger whole of the letter, "submerged in the story of which it is a part." (58) Ah hah, this put my thoughts, my issues into focus. Like Mrs. Jansen’s recipes, this book is also an experiment in description and narration with recipes submerged into the story. These recipes are not divorced from the narrative I’m relating about the history of the potato, as the recipes and narration are divorced in most cookbooks. The recipes interact with other texts to discern and recreate a bit of daily life and cultural context for common potato eaters. But it’s also important to acknowledge that each contains the personality of the author. As you read the recipes, recognize both parts of the whole, an individual personality and a cultural context.

Each country I studied had a different combination of texts and quirks that made each research and recipe gathering process unique. In Peru I had to rely almost entirely on explorers’ writings and interpretations of archeological evidence to piece together how potatoes fit in with cultural and spiritual life there. Out of necessity I recreated recipes to represent food as it might have been in ancient Peru. For Irish recipes I consulted an excellent cookbook called Irish Traditional Food by Theodora Fitzgibbon. She is intimately interested in preserving and consolidating information about Irish food and culture. For fifteen years she researched the topic, talking with old people and reading the related literature. A documentary history of the potato famine and The History and Social Influence of the Potato by Radcliffe Salaman provided valuable texts and information about Irish politics and social conditions. While Ireland has such well-documented history, consolidated in so many places, researching Russia meant following scant leads to find only one or two sentences which suited my purpose. I used two superb cookbooks to discover information about Russian food and their attitude toward food and the occastional lack of it: Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman and The Complete Russian Cookbook by Lynn Visson. Bremzen and Welchman traveled all over the Soviet Union and other enclaves of Russian culture for five years collecting recipes for their book. They produce a very broad spectrum of dishes, from very simple fried potatoes, to complicated and time consuming noodle dumplings. Visson collected her recipes from the elegant Russian emigre ladies she grew up with in the United States. Here is where I ran into concerns with class issues and the recipes. Her recipes are definitely not regular peasant fare, but still convey an essence of what Russian people want to preserve about their cooking, which in turn says important things about their culture. Researching the U.S. I had the opposite problem as I had in Peru. America publishes so many cookbooks with so many recipes I was nearly overwhelmed. My favorite cookbook here was The All-American Potato Cookbook, if only because of it’s wonderful title. I attacked them with specific ideas in mind and used only those exactly suited to my purpose. I also looked beyond cookbooks to books and articles about industry for information on processing techniques. I found two American food history books especially helpful: Revolution at the Table by Harvey A Levenstein and Fashionable Foods by Sylvia Lovegren. I especially liked Fashionable Foods because it provided a model of narrative and recipes woven together into a coherent text.