Tag: Southern

Southern

Cookbooks published in Southern states
Cookbooks published in Southern states

The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph (1824) is one of the first cookbooks to be published in the United States which was not an American edition of an English book. It is considered by some to be the first truly American cookbook and by all to be the first regional American cookbook (Feeding America). The book influenced generations of Southern cooks and it is still in print today.

Cookbooks published in the Southeast comprise only 6% of the Early American Cookbooks collection, but text analysis of this small number still shows a clear distinction when compared to the full set.  The over-represented terms show a number of distinctly southern terms such as Creole or Atlanta as well as ingredients associated with the south such as okra and pecans. Citrus crops in Florida are represented by grapefruit and Sealdsweet, the brand name of a citrus company. 

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

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

Regional cookbooks

This map shows the number of books published per state for the full collection of 1450 cookbooks. New York has the greatest number of books published, followed by Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and California. These numbers align with the growth of the book publishing industry in the United States. New York City, traditionally the publishing center of the United States, published the greatest number over time, followed by other publishing centers in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The trend in the numbers also shows the history of westward expansion from 1800 to 1920, with the greatest total numbers in the East and much lower numbers in the West.

Dividing the collection into United States census regions shows that 61.1% of the titles were published in the Northeastern region, 24% were published in the Midwest, 8.8% in the West, and 6.1% in the Southeast. 

The map was created by downloading the MARCXML catalog records for the collection from the HathiTrust Research Center. The records were converted using MarcEdit and then sorted and cleaned using OpenRefine. The records were then loaded into Tableau to create latitude and longitude data from state names and to make a filled map displaying the number of records per state.