“I started looking at old cookbooks and one thing led to another”

May 23, 2021 1:29 PM

In July 2020 Barbara Ketcham Wheaton launched The Sifter, a searchable database to assist people with food related questions.

Background and more information over at Gastro Obscura.

The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s. Search “peacock” and you’ll find the bird’s meat was sometimes eaten from the 1400s to the 1700s in courtly England.

posted by forbiddencabinet (10 comments total)

Oops. I dropped a link. Here's the link to the Gastro Obscura article.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 1:32 PM on May 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Super interesting from a historical perspective. I used to use Eat Your Books, which seems to have some similar functionality, though is entirely focused on the cookbooks you personally own.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 1:43 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

She made her own punch cards to keep track and sorted them with a knitting needle! What a badass.
posted by emjaybee at 3:24 PM on May 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh wow, this is mind-boggling, I am going to get LOST in this.

I've always found old cookbooks to be fascinating and there's so much historical context to sleuth out.

For example, I went straight for the New Orleans search results and there was a very promising title from 1885(!) called The Creole Cookery with the subtitle "Recipes contributed by experienced housekeepers".

Hmm, looks interesting, housekeepers are the ones who you know, actually cook on a daily basis, I bet there's all sorts of amazing recipes. Upon further investigation, I see the book was created by the "Christian Woman's Exchange of New Orleans, to provide funds for a new building." Ok, so the local church doing a community cookbook, still, I bet there are are some gems in there.

So I look for Jambalaya, and find this recipe:

"JUMBALLAYA.
A SPANISH CREOLE DISH.

Wash 1 lb. of rice, and soak it an hour; cut up a cold
roast chicken or the remnants of a turkey and a slice of
ham, which fry in a tablespoonful of lard; stir in the rice,
and add slowly, while stirring in a pint of hot water; cover
your pot, and set where it can cook slowly. Jumballaya is
very nice made with oysters or shrimp."

Huh, that seems very um...minimal. Like, as in there's not even a single spice in there. I know the recipe has probably evolved over the years, but really?

Then I start thinking, given that these are likely upper class church-going matrons probably asking their creole housekeepers for recipes. I wonder if these housekeepers are like, fuck off no way I'm giving you my family recipe, or they just gave them something fake to get them off their backs?

No idea, a historian could probably tell me why, and truth be told, I've just skimmed this, I bet there are some gems in here.

But never mind that, I can say with authority that 19th century New Orleans loved their desserts. I mean, holy shit, there's over 77 PAGES of cakes, puddings, and ice cream recipes alone!
posted by jeremias at 3:49 PM on May 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

JUMBALLAYA

That recipe contains (1) no spices (2) no vegetables other than rice (where's the Holy Trinity?) and (3) no information about ratios or cook times. Something tells me the ladies of the Christian Woman's Exchange were either very bad editors, or had never consumed the dish themselves. Or maybe it's just that cookbooks in 1885 sucked ass, I can't say I've read many.
posted by axiom at 9:36 PM on May 23, 2021

I believe the Trinity in creole cooking is a relatively modern thing, certainly after 1885.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:47 PM on May 23, 2021

Interesting. Even still, you'd expect some kind of vegetable or mention of salt, wouldn't you? I would expect that even though the chicken and ham might contain some salt on their own, an entire pound(!) of rice would call for some more salt. Maybe "salt to taste" was just implicit.
posted by axiom at 12:01 AM on May 24, 2021

It’s worth noting that many older cookbooks leave out things that were considered common knowledge at the time. “Salt to taste” would certainly be among these things. But you can even see such directions as, “Slaughter, dress and prepare a young chicken for roasting the usual way,” with no instruction whatsoever how to do that. So it’s possible that some seasoning aspects of the recipe were taken for granted or assumed to be implied by the title (e.g., Creole = tomato). It also seems that there was considerable variability in what was considered Jambalaya in the 19th century, with a mid century recipe being chicken and ham cooked with rice and seasoned only with salt and pepper.

It’s also worth noting that the Christian Woman's Exchange of New Orleans was an organization whose purpose was to provide a place for needy women to sell homemade items. If their recipes were meant to be for quick, easy, inexpensive foods, that may also explain why the recipe doesn’t include a lot of bells and whistles we might otherwise expect.
posted by slkinsey at 5:48 AM on May 24, 2021 [8 favorites]

Wow, absolutely fantastic find. It was a bit confusing at first. The site isn't a collection of recipes, but a collection of the information about the people who wrote recipe books, and about the types of recipes, etc. Though there are some very old recipe books scanned for viewing. Right now I'm looking through Mrs Nary Eales's Receipts, who apparently was the confectioner for Queen Anne, and was published in 1773. There are so many types of food I've never even heard of, like flummery. There are also a lot of recipes for clear-cakes, which I absolutely cannot find any information on, but looking at the recipe it seems to be a clear flavored jelly? Which is astounding to me, because over the past 3 years or so rain drop cakes and other clear jelly cakes have become a HUGE fad, and its wild to think this is something we did 250 years ago, forgot about, and the re-created.
posted by FirstMateKate at 1:58 PM on May 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

Something tells me the ladies of the Christian Woman's Exchange were either very bad editors, or had never consumed the dish themselves.

I collect old cookbooks and it is not uncommon to see recipes that say things like "Make a batter" or "make a dough" - out of what? How much of a batter? How much dough? What kind of dough? Or one of my favourites - "Use 13 cents worth of coconut" uh... ok? As slkinsey says, old cookbooks assume a lot so this can be a real challenge when approaching them from a modern perspective. In my experience, at least with dishes that are not haute cuisine, it usually it is implied that you'd season a dish to your tastes and that there is wiggle room in the recipe to make it your own.

there was a very promising title from 1885(!) called The Creole Cookery

You might also check out the The Picayune's Creole cook book.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:28 AM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]