As you know if you’re a reader of this site, there are vast, interactive (and free!) scholarly databases online collecting just about every kind of artifact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a significant number of cookbooks online, too. But proper searchable, historical databases of cookbooks seem to have appeared only lately. To my mind these might have been some of the first things to become available. How important is eating, after all, to virtually every part of our lives? The fact is, however, that scholars of food have had to invent the discipline largely from scratch.

“Western scholars had a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry. ‘It’s the baser sense,’ says Cathy Kaufman, a professor of food studies at the New School.” Kaufman sits on the board of The Sifter, a new massive, multi-lingual online database of historical recipe books. Another board member, sculptor Joe Wheaton, puts things more directly: “Food history has been a bit of an embarrassment to a lot of academics, because it involves women in the kitchen.”

Luckily for food scholars, the situation has changed dramatically. There are now over 2,000 historical Mexican cookbooks of all kinds online at the University of Texas San Antonio, for example. (The UTSA is busy curating and translating hundreds of those recipes into English for what they call a “series of mini-cookbooks.”)  And scholars of food history may have to be pulled away by force from The Sifter, a vast, ever-expanding Wikipedia-like archive of food research.

<img id="article-image-77137" class="article-image with-structured-caption lazyloaded" style="color:#000000;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:auto;text-align:start;text-indent:0;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:auto;word-spacing:0;-webkit-text-size-adjust:auto;text-decoration:none;" src="https://msamba.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/image.jpg&quot; alt="The Art of Cookery Made Plain And Easy, a 1777 cookbook included in the database, "which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind yet published," was popular in Britain and the American colonies. Its author, Hannah Glasse, was one of the first famous female cookbook authors.” width=”auto”>The Art of Cookery Made Plain And Easy, a 1777 cookbook included in the database, “which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind yet published,” was popular in Britain and the American colonies. Its author, Hannah Glasse, was one of the first famous female cookbook authors. PUBLIC DOMAIN

The database collects “over 5,000 authors and 5,000 works with details about the authors and about the contents of the works,” the site explains. “The central documents are cookbooks and other writings related to getting, preparing, and consuming food, and the activities associated with them, as well as writings about cultural and moral attitudes.” Like Wikipedia, users are invited to submit their own data, which can be edited by other users. Unlike the public encyclopedia, which we know has serious flaws, The Sifter is overseen by experts, and inspired by none other than the expert Julia Child herself, or at least by her library.

Although the Sifter does not contain actual texts or recipes, it does collect the bibliographic data of thousands of such books, a treasury for scholars, researchers, and historians. The primary force behind the project, Barbara Wheaton, was a neighbor of Julia Childs’ in the early 1960s and used Childs’ library and Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library Culinary Collection (where she is now an honorary curator) to become “one of the best-known scholars of culinary history.”[…]

Continue reading:http://www.openculture.com/2020/09/a-database-of-5000-historical-cookbooks-covering-1000-years-of-food-history-is-now-online.html