Cookbooks as Culinary Snapshots

In the 1880s, two antebellum cookbooks emerged that provided culinary snapshots of regional cuisines. Lafcadio Hearn's La Cuisine Creole spotlighted New Orleans food and cooking, while Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking highlighted Southern food. These texts, unlike many of the cookbooks published before the 1880s, offered culinary snapshots of distinct regional foodways; previous cookbooks were often hospitality manuals designed to coach domestic and professional servants. As visual technologies changed in the U.S., introducing what Walter Benjamin dubbed the "age mechanical reproduction," cookbooks increasingly focused on connecting food and place through verbal snapshots provided by the recipes. Snapshots, or more generally, images, condense large amounts of information. Recipes, for example, invite readers to extract sensual images--taste, touch, sound, scent, and appearance--along with abstract measurements that compose a particular dish. When Fisher, describing a recipe for biscuits, tells her readers to "add your water gradually in mixing so as to make dough stiff" and then "roll out the dough to thickness of third of an inch" she creates an image of food that is temporal ("gradually"), sensual ("stiff"), and quantitative. This description is an image of Southern food that is felt in the fingers as much as it is measured by the eyes.

Recipes, coupled with scopic regimes of the nineteenth century, reorganized relationships among spectators, food, and place. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argues, the "aura" of a painting is lost; a place, likewise, becomes a reproducible image, its authenticity is produced through images rather than seen as inherent in its material location. Dominant ways of seeing shifted from the technique of perspective, which focused the spectator's attention on a single point, to the figure of the camera, which saw an object from multiple perspectives. The multiplicity of recipes focused on a single geographic region echoed the visual habits afforded by the camera: recipes provided multiple snapshots of a distinct place. In addition to the camera, which invited disembodied visual habits, the doctrine of specific nerve energies--a theory posited by physiologists that the body was a visual producers--informed nineteenth-century visual habits. The boundary between inside and outside was blurred by recipes, like Fisher's, that folded sensual experience into the production of food. For Fisher, the taste and appearance of food emerges from the cook's capacity to taste, touch, smell, and see, offering (the appearance of) a personal dimension to the experience of regional foodways. Recipes oscillate between numerous, disembodied images of regional foods and sensual, embodied images of food that could create an image of a deeply personal experience of place. Place could be known through multiple, embodied culinary snapshots.