This is the third part of Wayfinding, a series on the history and design of cookbooks.
I’m sitting on the floor of my office, sorting my family’s recipe cards into folders. A former archivist, it’s important to me that these are preserved long-term, which means buffered archival folders and boxes. Recipe cards are ephemeral: due in part to their acidic cardstock and in part to the limited cultural value assigned to them. To most people, recipe boxes hold importance at an individual or family level, but unlike published cookbooks, their connection to broader social contexts is often overlooked.
Culinary materials sit at the boundary of public and private spheres in a way many other subjects don’t: Cookbooks document the activities of our private worlds in a public way; recipe cards adapt those public trends and return them to intimate, private contexts. And marginalia in books gives us a bit of both.
The private sphere and ephemera
I want to keep a record of what my ancestors cooked, right down to the Jello salad and cottage cheese in lettuce cups, because each card is a record of my family: Their culinary aspirations, their habits, who they shared with, what they shared. When I open my family recipe boxes, I see a microcosm of food writing. These boxes are a reminder that even in these intimate spaces of the private sphere, the public seeps in in surprising ways.
Older recipes are written out in paragraphs, a reminder to a person who’s done it before. Newer recipes are less about cooking alongside a person but trying to provide that experience to a person who’s not there, a reflection of larger-scale shifts in recipe formatting.
In my recipe box, the recipes my mom and grandma exchanged as adults are written the way so many modern recipes are: Ingredients, steps. Maybe a yield, sometimes a note (“good for parties!” “Fast!”) Mom moved away from home at 17, and despite the distance, mom’s cooking techniques reflected grandma’s.
And in turn, mine reflect both and the hands of the many ancestors who shaped all three of our kitchen practices: hearty chunks of vegetables over a fine, even dice, for example. But our private sphere reflects the larger collective shift in recipe writing: All three of our recipe cards have steps and ingredient lists. But my great grandmother’s recipe cards? Not so much. Only three generations separate us from those paragraph constructions—culinary love letters in the form of an instructions.
Culinary wayfinding
For centuries we relied on paper maps, written lists of directions, and our own internal compass to navigate through the physical world. Now, with GPS, our internal compass has become externalized: We rely on someone else to lay out the steps of our path. Our focus is more on the act of walking a predetermined route, than on the act of pathmaking.
The change in recipe formats offers the same potential shift in wayfinding: When steps are laid out like a scientific formula, more about replication than revelation, our internal culinary compass becomes pointed towards an external source. Food historian Ken Albala notes that yes, there are reasons we cook certain things certain ways, but if we focus only on the way we’re told food is “supposed” to be, we risk losing the art of culinary discovery.
Handwritten culinary ephemera is like wayfinding using a map a friend drew for you, so you can find their house: The larger tools and concepts of mapmaking remain the same, but the exact map-making practice itself has individual quirks. A palm-sized measurement, a specific teacup in the pantry, a way of measuring time by sight, smell and sound is a specific and personal kind of map-making, whereas wayfinding with modern printed cookbooks we encounter expected markers along the path.
Manuscript cookbooks and public and private spheres
Manuscript cookbooks are, simply, handwritten collections of recipes, typically in a single copy (akin to my recipe boxes) or a small number of copies. While printed books are typically the work of many hand—writers, editors, designers, printers—handwritten archival materials often are the work of one set of hands.
They are, however, still edited in some way, even just by the author: Even in our private, unpublished lives, we curate what we write down and how we share about ourselves. Our creation of private culinary texts was influenced, too, as higher literacy meant the higher potential for recorded recipes from more sources: though many recipes still never made it to the page. As Cynthia Bertelsen notes in A Hastiness of Cooks, “by the time a cook . . .recorded recipes on vellum or parchment, you can be sure that such recipes had existed for quite some time, albeit in oral form.” The possibility of documenting a recipe, in public or private, does not always translate to reality.
There’s another factor, too: “cookbooks presume literacy, they presume an audience that can read,” says historian Michelle King, which for many Chinese women through history was not true. Some manuscript books do address food, and some even have recipes, but because men were the primary audience, it was more about preserving existing knowledge than teaching the reader to cook. The same was true in Europe: Food historian Ken Albala notes that we can learn about the foods ancient Romans ate from some written accounts and even some recipes (like Apicius). But this was not the case (just a few centuries later) by the Early Middle Ages.
Albala reminds us that cookbooks were manuscript cookbooks at one point. And they were expensive to make. As a result, what was written down was considered most precious by people in power: And the recipes that fed them each day often weren’t valued enough to be recorded. Historian Roger Chartier argues that increases in printing, silent reading, and literacy rates allowed for texts to be consumed in a new way, as reading moves from a largely social activity to a private one. Societies were impacted as more information was disseminated and materials could be consumed by the individual more discreetly. Information could now be formatted to meet different audiences and different needs.
Weaving our way through the history of manuscript books means defining what public versus private means: Private writing is often considered to be writing done by an individual for that individual (e.g. a diary), while public writing is shared with others: a scholarly work, a biography, a speech.
But here, book history eludes our quest for a clear division between the two: Private diaries can later become publicly accessible in archives, manuscript books can appear later in printed editions. And what about marginalia?
Ephemeral borderlands
Marginalia is a place where the ephemera from the private sphere intersects with the shared information of the public sphere. Here, I’m excluding the marginalia we write in our private notebooks, to focus on the marginalia within public works like printed books. On this path, the reader engages in conversation with the author through their private notes, long after the author’s work has been done, dusted, and made public.
In cookbook history, the interaction between text and reader offers a rich site for intellectual inquiry and hands-on experimentation. Marginalia allows us a glimpse into these interactions: The reader’s incorporation and adaptation of the author’s text. The questions, the dismissals of given parts of the text (“do NOT add 1/2 c nuts, as suggested!”), the epiphanies (“wow, the buttermilk here is KEY!”) and the customizations (“better with chocolate chips than chunks”).
Marginalia also ask us to blur the lines of format: The printed book made for public consumption, with the private notes unique to one instance of the book. Where then does this book lie in our dichotomy of public and private? How do we classify a printed book filled with handwritten notes, and thus the multi-authorship of that copy’s words? Could it perhaps be that the marginalia asks us to consider both/and, rather than either/or? Our current culture is often “here for the comments,” the marginalia of our public, digital commons. If you’re not reading the comments in the NYT Cooking App, you’re missing out on the joy, madness, and expertise of cooking as community activity.
The materials we use, and how we use them, informs the history we save: A cuneiform tablet recording an ephemeral moment (like the sale of grain) nonetheless is durable because of its format. Even if broken apart, there’s a chance it can be pieced together again. But my mom’s recipe card for split pea soup, which is yellowing around the edges only 30 years after being written? Not so much.
But our value judgments about those materials inform the history we save, too. We often hear the adage, “history is written by the victors,” but when it comes to the history of the everyday, of the meals we eat and how they’re made, whose history is being recorded? To wayfind through cookbook history is to wayfind through the story of what we choose to encode from our everyday lives.
As we wayfind through the history of the cookbook, we’re reminded that cookbooks already ride this line between the public and private through their subject matter, capturing experiences and information that risk ephemerality without our intervention. A meal, a memory, and a recipe don’t last forever after all, unless we decide differently.
