The cookbook as a responsive form

Abstract

The purpose of this special edition of Food and Foodways is to examine the cookbook in a fresh light. Previous criticism of cookbooks has concentrated on how the cookbook reflects history, culture and social patterns of behavior. Cookbook criticism has revealed important food histories, unearthed significant cultural phenomena, and demonstrated new ways of understanding social connections and behaviors. This has ranged from recording courtly cuisines to the output of celebrity television chefs, and from the manuals of domestic science movements to individual, personal attachments to cookbooks. The essays in this special edition, however, consider the cookbook as a responsive form, as texts which galvanize or intervene or even resist cultural contexts. Each of the articles considers how a cookbook or small group of closely-related genre cookbooks has answered a set of circumstances. More than holding a mirror to society and culture, these cookbooks are shown to be culturally responsive too.