Intensification of Food Images in Late-Nineteenth Century Cookbooks

Two cookbooks, Lafcadio Hearn's 1885 La Cuisine Creole and Abby Fisher's 1881 What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, mark divergent turns in food images during the nineteenth century. Hearn, a folklorist working within the scientific tradition, visualizes Creole foodways through a documentary lens; he assumes the role of a documenter, rather than a representative, of Creole culture. Fisher, a former slave, writes within the African American autobiographical tradition, periodically revealing biographical detail in her recipes. She explicitly represents southern foodways, drawing from African American culture a body of shared experiences. In both cases, food becomes the central source of expression, translating the nineteenth century scientific lens and the African American autobiographical tradition into food images. Paralleling this translation of cultural material into food images, developments in visual and visualizing technology--especially the camera and the telegraph--intensified geographic relations and daily routines, a process David Harvey, among others, calls "time-space compression." The world's geographic space becomes compressed into Marshall McLuhan's "global village," and, according to urbanist Paul Virilio, "global" time becomes instantaneous. Visual technologies and the epistemological changes that accompany them accelerate the pace of daily life and shrink the size of the perceived world, affecting the way food images are deployed.

As visualizing technologies change the way spectators see the world and space-time compression emerges as symptom of these technologies, food images take on new roles through a process of intensification. Drawing from the thermodynamics concept of intensity and from Immanuel Kant's studies on "intensive magnitude," philosophers use intensity to refer to forces--like temperature, pressure, and speed--that push complex systems towards a "tipping point" "where quantitative change suddenly leads to qualitative change" (Taylor 148). Intensive properties cannot be added up to grasp the whole: "one does not add, for example, three 'units' of ten degrees to apprehend a temperature of thirty degrees" (Bonata and Protevi 100). Rather, an intensity like speed refers to a relationship between bodies (Virilio). Between food images of the late-nineteenth century, for example, visual habits influenced by the telegraph and the camera changed the way spectators saw food. This change in the way people saw food, I claim, reaches a tipping point in the late-nineteenth century when food becomes more than a literary trope and emerges as a way of seeing in itself.

The cookbooks of Hearn and Fisher mark a shift to food as a way of seeing and knowing, specifically within the folklorist and African American literary traditions. Although a large number of cookbooks were printed before the appearance of Hearn's and Fisher's cookbooks in the 1880s, the appearance of Hearn's and Fisher's texts within four years of each other provide a space for comparing the ways visual intensification affects food images. Explicitly, Hearn records the recipes of "Creole housewives" to provide "the young housekeeper" with simple, delicious dishes made "from the things usually thrown away by the extravagant servant" ("Introduction"). However, Hearn's cookbook, along with his collection of Creole aphorisms, Gombo Zhebes, was initially marketed at the World's Fair, also known as the World Cotton Centennial, held in New Orleans from 1884-85 (Gotham). Published for a global audience, Hearn's cookbook facilitated the production of New Orleans as a tourist culture famous for its food. As he claims in the subtitle of his cookbook, the recipes are drawn "From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for Its Cuisine." Shaped by the demands of the global market, Hearn's La Cusine Creole contrasts with regional tone of Fisher's Preface: "The publication of a book on my knowledge and experience of Southern Cooking, Pickle and Jelly Making, has been frequently asked of me by my lady friends and patrons in San Francisco and Oakland, and also by ladies of Sacramento during the State Fair in 1879." Written for her "friends," Fisher's cookbook reveals select details about her life that, while few in number, color her recipes as intensely personal extensions of her lived experience. In both cases, food images invite particular ways of seeing that respond, both directly and obliquely, to the intensification of visual habits in the late-nineteenth century.