Famous cookbooks – Early American Cookbooks

Authors chart

The most prolific authors in the collection are the famous names of 19th century cooking: Catharine Beecher, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Corson, Fannie Farmer, Marion Harland, Eliza Leslie, Mary J. Lincoln, Marion Harris Neil, Maria Parloa, Sarah Tyson Rorer, and Maria Eliza Rundell. These women’s books went through multiple editions and printings and reached millions of American households.

Other notable authors include Ella Eaton Kellogg, health food advocate and wife of John Harvey Kellogg, William A. Alcott, first president of the American Vegetarian Association, Rufus Estes, African-American railway chef, and Jessup Whitehead, chef and restauranteur.

eac-author-chart

Frugal cookbooks

Frugality has a long history in America. The Frugal Housewife by Susannah Carter (first edition 1772) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in the United States. Later books on the same theme included A new system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of economy by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell (1814), The American Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child (1835), and Economical cookery by Marion Harris Neil (1918).

Did frugal cookbooks differ markedly from other cookbooks? A text analysis comparison shows some interesting results.

Was the word “frugal” a common term in cookbooks? Did if fall in and out of favor over time? Check out the timeline chart of when the word appears in the Early American Cookbooks collection

Fannie Farmer

Fannie Merritt Farmer (1857-1915) was a major figure in American cooking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her most successful cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, was first published in 1896 and sold millions of copies in many subsequent printings and editions. The 100th anniversary edition was published in 1996 and the book is still in print today.

The book was the first to introduce precise measurement and Farmer later became “the mother of level measurements.” Her discussion of food composition, caloric calculations and the body’s need for nutrients, formed a systematic view of cooking that influenced cooking instruction for decades to come (Feeding America).

Text analysis of Farmer’s books clearly illustrates her emphasis on precise measurements. When her books are compared to the full set of titles in Early American Cookbooks, the over and under-represented terms show that measurement is the key difference. In the tag clouds below, the over-represented terms are tablespoons, teaspoons, and cup. The under-represented terms are teaspoonful, tablespoonful and cupful which were frequently used in cookbooks of the era. Farmer insisted upon the difference between a vague “teaspoonful” and an exact “teaspoon.”

Fannie Farmer over-represented terms (Meandre Dunning Log Likelihood to Tagcloud Algorithm)

This visualization was created by comparing two sets of texts, Fannie Farmer cookbooks and the full Early American Cookbooks set, using the Meandre Dunning Log-likelihood to Tagcloud algorithm in the HathiTrust Research Center Portal.