Jump Right In: A New Tool for Historical Research Using Cookbooks

On July 10 of this year 2020, a huge, open-access editable cook book data base—The Sifter–went on line.  

Half a century and more than half a lifetime has passed since the food historian Barbara Wheaton conceived the project. Over time the team grew. Her daughter, librarian Catherine Saines, helped out from early days and and her son, sculptor Joe Wheaton joined later. Then came a professional programmers and an advisory board.  At the end of July, shortly after her 89th birthday, Barbara and her team demonstrated it at the Virtual Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery.  

 5,000 authors have already been entered. So have 5,000 different works, most of them cookbooks. A vast number of these cookbooks have details about the lives of the authors, the multiple editions, the sections of the book, the names of the recipes, and the ingredients and tools needed to prepare these recipes. These are not reprints but a breakdown of the contents. For now, most of the books are in European languages but entries can be in any of a hundred languages. English as the base language and searching in English will pull up these other language entries.

As expressions of awe and questions flooded the Oxford Symposium chat room, Barbara glowed. With good reason.

If you’d like to join this endeavor, Barbara and team have made it really easy.  Go to thesifter.org and you can play around.  Register if you want to be able to save your searches. It only takes a few seconds.  And if you need help, just hop on over to Youtube for two videos to hear Barbara describe it and  Cathy Kaufmann get you started.  You’ll also find the team are very responsive to the contact page. If you have a favorite historic cookbook or collection of cookbooks, jump right in.

Perhaps you want to know more though.

The Back Story to the Sifter

A lively history of Barbara Wheaton and the evolution of The Sifter by food writer Bee Wilson appeared in the New York Times Magazine.  I’ll just add a couple of stories of my own. 

Barbara Wheaton was one of a handful of people who had made her mark in the field when I first started thinking about writing food history in Hawaii around 1990. After all, her experiment in cooking a peacock had appeared in Harvard Magazine, paving the way for the publication of her major work Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (1983)–still in print!  When I asked Natalie Zemon Davis, former president of the American Historical Association, about who was doing serious work in food history when I was in Princeton in 1992, it was Barbara Wheaton that she identified.  

Then in 1996 (I think) Barbara and some like-minded food historians from the Cambridge area attended a talk I gave at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT.  My topic had to do with the links between Paracelsian chemistry and taste in seventeenth-century France.  One of the questions from the somewhat cynical audience had to do with why early recipes did not give measurements. Barbara came to my rescue. “You can’t have standard measurements without standard ingredients,” she pointed out, with those few words bringing the group around to the idea that intelligent thought about food was possible.

Over the years, Barbara has taught dozens of budding and experienced food historians to apply intelligent thought to historic cookbooks though her “structured approach” to reading historic cookbooks, a course she taught regularly under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Thanks to Emily Contois for this synopsis. 

If you are interested in following this up, you have two sources.

Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire: “Toward a structured approach to reading historic cookbooks.” M/C Journal. 16 (2013).

Emily Contois “Listening to the voices in historic cookbooks.” Blog (2017)

Food history and more than food history

Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “What’s so interesting about cookbooks?  Don’t they just tell housewives how to make roasts and cakes?”  Well, yes, in the western tradition they do that, and in other traditions they also describe the basic food preparations.  They do more though.

Think about what cooking is. Cooking involves the many ways humans transform what they hunt, gather, fish or farm into new forms. It’s one of our oldest, most complex, and most time- and energy-consuming technical achievements.

As a result, divisions of class, gender, and ethnicity are mapped on to who cooks and who escapes that chore, divisions revealed by cookbooks. The raw materials cooks had to work with, and hence patterns of gardening, farming, hunting, fishing and trade are recorded in cookbooks. Religious beliefs specify which foods are thought to be acceptable, even sacred, and which have been tabooed, which days are for fasting and which for feasting, all these surfacing in recipes.  And so on. Just think what historians have been able to extract from studying, say, legal documents, or poring over genealogy sites.

Not “just cookbooks” then, not just histories of recipes but as Barbara has pointed out time and again an invaluable resource that focuses all areas of human history. 

 In the Frequently Asked Questions on the Sifter site is one that I love:

“What can I find?”

“That will be up to you.”

Thank you Barbara and all the team for this marvelous new tool. And thank you Barbara for all the inspiration, support and multiple kindnesses over the years.

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