Bibliography Week Lecture: Manuscript Cookbooks and Their Audience

If you were to keep a manuscript cookbook today, you would simply jot down or paste recipes into a notebook as you received them. Your book would resemble a personal recipe journal—or, perhaps, a recipe box in book form, if you marked off subject headings in your notebook at the outset.

But manuscript cookbook authors of the past did not compile recipes solely for their personal use, and their books were not mere journals. They intended their books to be read and used by others, just like printed books, the only difference being that their readership was their family and friends rather than an unknown public. When manuscript cookbooks are approached as books written for an audience, many of their puzzling features are illuminated.

Topics considered will include: the messages relayed by inscriptions; the use of printed-book features such as pagination and indexes; the copying of manuscript cookbooks by professional scribes; recurring hands versus added hands; hidden organizational patterns; attributions; and the rationales for borrowing recipes from print.

About the Speaker

Stephen Schmidt, the principal researcher and writer for The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey and a co-creator of its website, has studied historical Anglo-American cooking for over thirty years and has published, spoken, and consulted extensively on the subject. He is the author of Master Recipes, a 940-page general-purpose cookbook, was a principal contributor to the 1997 and 2006 editions of Joy of Cooking, and was a frequent contributor to Cook’s Illustrated from 1992 through 1998. He also teaches cooking, tests and develops recipes, and consults on cookbook projects.