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“Food can be a strong place to talk about things we don’t want to talk about,” Zahara Gómez Lucini said at last night’s special Zócalo program, “Do We Need More Food Fights?” The event, presented in partnership with LA Cocina de Gloria Molina and California Humanities, was part of Zócalo’s 20th birthday series “What Connects Us?”

Gómez Lucini is the photographer and creator of Recetario para la memoria (The Memory Recipe Book), a cookbook that collects recipes from the families of desaparecidos—the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared in Mexico, many thought to be dead due to state-sponsored or cartel violence.

She was joined on stage at LA Cocina de Gloria Molina’s demonstration kitchen in downtown L.A. by Maite Gomez-Rejón, culinary historian and co-host of the “Hungry for History” podcast. During an emotional conversation streamed in front of a live audience, the two spoke about food, family, and memory, while preparing a recipe from Gómez Lucini’s cookbook, Blanca Soto’s “el pozole para Camilo.”

As Gomez-Rejón got started on the pozole, she gestured to large-scale photos of some of the dishes from the cookbook that lined the wall as part of an exhibition based on the cookbook. “The images are not like looking at a Bon Appetit magazine,” she said. “They’re so full of emotion. It’s this whole idea that cooking isn’t about satiating hunger, or nourishment, it’s something that unites us and, in the case of Recetario para la memoria, reunites us.”

Throwing some hominy, produced from corn, into the pot of boiling water, Gomez-Rejón then shared a little about the dish they were making that night. Pozole is pre-Hispanic, she explained, and is “the soul of Mexico.” Corn, too, she said, encapsulates the spirit of Mesoamerican mythology: “Humans were molded from masa.”

Turning to Gómez Lucini, she asked her to speak about her cookbooks. How did you get started on this project?

For years, Gómez Lucini said, she has been watching groups like the Sinaloa-based Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte, who have been fighting back against government indifference and complicity to search for the bodies of those they love. The tragedy of the desaparecidos is something that she knew about from stories her father, an Argentinian journalist, told her when she was growing up, about the many people who were forcibly disappeared from Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s and ’80s.

After moving to Mexico, Gómez Lucini realized that this history was “present” there, too. In 2019, her project got off the ground in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. By training, she was a documentary photographer, but she quickly realized that was not the best way to invite a conversation about the forced disappearance of so many people.

“How can we change the image of the victim? How can we not stigmatize each disappeared and each family looking for them?” she said. “We find that maybe the cook and the hearth of the house can be a way to be aware of the disappearance and to understand we can be part of that.”

How did you gain the trust of these women and families? Gomez-Rejón asked, adding bouillon into the pot with oregano, pepper, and garlic.

Gómez Lucini explained that she first met many of the women who participated in the project years before they collaborated together. “It was very natural in this way.” It was mostly women who went out searching for the disappeared.

Speculating on why it was mostly women who went out searching for the disappeared, Gómez Lucini said, “I think memory is a woman’s territory generally,” Gómez Lucini said. Gomez-Rejón cited other examples of women using the kitchen as activism in the face of government neglect, and even community cookbooks as a form of alternative memory.

As the ingredients started to simmer on stage, Gomez-Rejón brought up the nostalgia and empathy invoked in each photograph of dishes and asked Gómez Lucini about her method when photographing these heartfelt dishes.

“I think it’s to be intimate with each one. To find Camilo in the pozole, or find Roberto in the pizza. To find them in the food,” Gómez Lucini answered.

She noted a moment when she felt the power of these dishes: “When I understood that they didn’t cook the recipe since the disappearance. I think that’s a way to make it alive in some way. And to share the memory and talk about them as a living person and not dead.”

The dishes run from elaborate moles to a simple hard-boiled egg recipe. “All of us have a preferred dish,” Gómez Lucini said. “Maybe not the gastronomical one, but because your mom cooked it for you.”

Gomez-Rejón then invited a special guest, Blanca Soto, whose pozole recipe in honor of her husband, Camilo, was bubbling on the kitchen stove, to join them on stage.

How do you hope the memory of Camilo will live on? Gomez-Rejón asked Soto, who identified her husband’s remains six years ago this September. Soto spoke in Spanish, which Gomez-Rejón translated for the audience. Just by the act of sitting here, the memories of Camilo come back to life, she said, explaining that sometimes Camilo would eat pozole three times a day. He liked it very spicy, because it was “macho.”

Soto wore a green shirt emblazoned with a photograph of Camilo, and on the back the words “PROMESA CUMPLIDA” (Promise Accomplished). Soto explained that women who searched for their loved ones and found their remains wore green—it was the color of hope (they always had the hope their loved ones would be found). But the majority of women, who still search, wear white shirts with the words “I will search for you always” (in Spanish).

The search for closure—for a trace of the missing—can end with as little as a piece of bone. “We don’t look for bones, we look for treasures,” some of the women say.

With the pozole finished, the three women took their first bites. Soto commented how nice it was that somebody else had made it for her this time.

The post Making Pozole and Memorializing Mexico’s Disappeared appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ezgulian is a well-respected figure in professional culinary circles who judges exclusive culinary competitions such as the Bocuse d’Or and champions women’s contributions to French cuisine. But she also maintains what we think of as housewife sensibilities, and has become one of France’s key figures in the “zero waste” cooking movement. “I believe in showing people how they can reinvent their leftovers or use ingredients they usually throw away,” she tells me as she moves around the kitchen.

And that’s when it hits me: What draws me to Sonia Ezgulian is how perfectly she reflects and subverts the tensions that exist in France between domestic and professional cooking. Women have always worked in French professional kitchens. But we hear about them and see them less often than men—in part, my research suggests, because women’s traditional ties to unpaid care work have sidelined them. Ezgulian manages to celebrate domestic cookery while creating a strong connection to professional culinary arts. She telegraphs the notion that women’s culinary accomplishments are equally important in restaurants and at home.

Ezgulian’s biography straddled the two spheres from the get-go. She never went to culinary school, deciding to become a professional cook after working for many years as a successful journalist in Paris. She and her husband Emmanuel moved to Lyon, Ezgulian’s hometown, and opened a small restaurant called Oxalis in 1999. The restaurant showcased Ezgulian’s creativity and playfulness in the kitchen, bringing new life to Lyonnais cuisine, which had a reputation for being stodgy and bourgeois. The local papers quickly touted Ezgulian as a new mère lyonnaise, a particular sort of domestic-turned-professional female cook.

Lyon, the third-largest city in France, has a long history of women cooking professionally. At the turn of the 20th century, many women worked as cooks in bourgeois homes there, but as the economy in France entered a downturn, many of them lost their jobs as domestic laborers and went to work in restaurants where they perfected dishes such as poularde en demi-deuil (truffled braised chicken) and fonds d’artichauts au foie gras (artichoke hearts with foie gras). These were simple, hearty dishes that exalted prestigious ingredients, the hallmarks of bourgeois cuisine. The women’s reputation for excellent cooking grew, and gastronomes such as Curnonsky, an early restaurant critic, began to call these women les mères lyonnaises (“Mothers of Lyon”). These cooks did not recognize each other as a unified group, but the growing genre of gastronomic literature about their food created a movement of sorts.

Sonia was befuddled by the mère label, because she did not see her cooking as part of the tradition of stodgy cuisine that had come to define Lyon. She was a woman in a restaurant kitchen. Was that all it took to be a mère?

The quintessential mère lyonnaise was Eugénie Brazier. Born in the countryside near Lyon, Brazier worked in a bourgeois home before apprenticing under the renowned mère Fillioux. Fillioux was as famous for her terse attitude toward her customers and staff as she was for her tableside service of whole chickens, which would fall apart at the tiniest cut from her dainty knife. Brazier went on to run two three-starred Michelin restaurants of her own in the 1930s, an accomplishment no other woman has yet replicated.

Eugénie Brazier died in 1977, and while she is an important cultural figure in Lyon, her memory largely remains relegated to the dusty annals of local gastronomic history. The rest of France and the world associates Lyon’s food with the recently deceased, homegrown, super-star chef Paul Bocuse, whose image graces the city’s murals.

French society charges women with being the central caregivers at home. Women who choose to pursue careers instead—as well as those who shoulder the double weight of professional careers and motherhood—face a robust glass ceiling in many professions. The culinary arts are no exception: The professionalization of cooking in France has largely focused on keeping women out of kitchens. The figure of the chef in popular culture is almost always represented as male. Starting in culinary school, women encounter structural barriers, gender stereotypes, and sometimes even sexual harassment. Many women report having their culinary instructors pass them over for top apprenticeship positions in favor of their male peers. Others are channeled into areas such as pastry, often referred to as the pink ghetto of the kitchen, which are seen as more creative and feminine. These problems are not uniquely French. But given the centrality of the culinary arts in French culture, the problem of gender inequality in the kitchen should be of national concern.

Ezgulian recalled her own feelings of exclusion during her apprenticeship at Michelin-starred Les Terrasses de Lyon at the Villa Florentine hotel. Everyone in the kitchen referred to her as “madame,” a sign of respect for her age but a dismissal of her place in the kitchen. “It’s definitely a boys club, and I knew I did not fit,” she said. At Les Terrasses, Ezgulian learned the ins-and-outs of haute cuisine. She also decided there that she would do things differently when she opened her own restaurant—the patriarchal hierarchies of the existing system were counterproductive to the creative work of cooking.

But discrimination continued even when she was in charge. When trying to hire male cooks, “there was one man who I interviewed and he kept asking me when he would get to meet the chef. I guess I did not fit his idea of a chef,” she said. Another male cook “quit one day right after the dinner service. He threw his apron on the floor and exclaimed, ‘I can’t work like this. You just don’t yell enough!’” Ultimately, Ezgulian decided she wanted to work alone. She simplified dishes so they required less labor and did away with heavy kitchen equipment like unwieldy oversized stockpots.

In her writing and media appearances today, Ezgulian gives women their due. While male chefs often nod to their mothers and grandmothers as the progenitors of their cuisine, they rarely give women’s domestic cookery credit for being foundational. Further erasures abound, particularly at the upper echelons. Currently, only one woman in France, Anne-Sophie Pic, heads a kitchen with three Michelin stars, and just two women, Andrée Rosier and Virginie Baselot, have ever been awarded the top accolade of Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Although more women than men enter culinary school, they are underrepresented in all areas of the culinary arts.

Ezgulian is working alongside Eugénie Brazier’s granddaughter, Jacotte Brazier, to promote women’s contributions to French cuisine. In 2007, Brazier started the nonprofit organization Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier, which grants scholarships to young women attending culinary school; Ezgulian also worked with Brazier to create a series of literary prizes to promote women’s food writing. Every year Les Amis holds a ceremony at the lavish Lyon town hall to honor annual scholarship and literary winners. For many of the young scholarship winners, it is the first time they have been validated publicly. Most importantly, Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier creates a much-needed support network for women in the culinary arts—the connections and opportunities to learn from people at the top of their field that can make or break a career.

Equality is possible in France’s kitchens. But first the nation must recognize that the professional and domestic settings are complementary. Sonia Ezgulian is not an outlier—but the exclusion she faced belongs in the past.

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We were at the K&W reflecting on a year-long mission to understand how Southern food shaped Southern identity. Both of us are academics at Southern universities, and we had come to our project with an interest in how rhetoric plays a role in shaping Southern identity—that is, how words and symbols send messages about how we see ourselves and others, our opinions, and our actions. We also both grew up in the South. Ashli is a Virginian; Wendy, a Texan. As adults, we chose to stay here to work and raise our families, knowing that the South would always feel like our only true home.

Exploring how Southern food communicates, playing a vital role in shaping and creating the identities of Southerners today, was a dream assignment—a rare chance to combine our work with pleasure. Food is a vital cultural component. It acts rhetorically by articulating identities and inviting individuals to embrace those identities. Analyzing food in the South, we believed, would help us better understand this culture we loved, in a broad-sweeping and universal kind of way. After all, everyone eats. Southerners, in particular, take a great deal of pride in family recipes, and have strong opinions about the regional cuisine. It is easy to get people to talk “Southern food-ese,” whether they are originally from the region or not.

Our travels took us from Charlotte, North Carolina to Birmingham, Alabama, and from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans, Louisiana. We prepared maps and agendas, wrote interview questions and brought note-taking tools, scheduled meetings, and made reservations. Before we took off, friends and family asked us which spots made the list for the “authentic Southern food experience.” Would our itinerary include Athens, Georgia’s Weaver D’s, Charleston’s Husk, or Austin’s Franklin’s Barbecue? Or were we going to stop by a Cracker Barrel in every town?

A shrimp po’ boy, and patrons, at local favorite Domilise’s, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo by Wendy Atkins-Sayre.

This second question was generally a joke, a knowing nod to the roadside restaurant chain’s often-derided faux-Southern decor and mediocre food. There would be no Cracker Barrels on our eating tour, we assured them. We knew “real Southern” fare when we saw it. Indeed, we would be frequenting places like Domilise’s, the legendary dive in uptown New Orleans known for its po’ boy sandwiches. The current explosion of writings on Southern food might not yield a uniform definition, but it almost always emphasizes locally grown produce, ingredients that were readily available and inexpensive, and a strong connection to the land. We would follow the lead of those in the know.

We did go to Domilise’s, and it did not disappoint. We waited 20 minutes, in wilting humidity, for the famous crusty French bread sandwiches, stuffed with fried shrimp, oysters, or roast beef. Photos, autographs, and beer bottles from long-shuttered breweries adorned the walls. The bar was weathered by the touch of thousands of visitors. Diners chatted away, happily greeting familiar faces behind the counters. It was obvious why folks in a town full of great food were so devoted to this spot. The food not only brought them to the same location, but also connected them through shared sensual experiences—the sights and sounds of the neighborhood joint, the smells and tastes of the simple meal so closely tied to the region.

Domilise’s was the real deal. But the scene at K&W, and many other eateries like it, seemed to be, too. Whether Grandma cooked the hog jowls or not, eating that particular dish, in that particular place, was necessary for the Charlotte crowd to start the year successfully. Being there, we were participating in an important community ritual. This gave us pause. Like Cracker Barrel, K&W is a chain, with dozens of locations, in several states. There is little, if anything, artisanal about it. But it was apparent that its patrons on New Year’s Day were having a “real Southern” food experience. Were chain restaurants necessarily inauthentic expressions of Southern identity, as some food critics—not to mention so many of our friends—seemed to think?

The more we traveled, the more we began to wonder. We also began to question our attempts at scholarly remove. Getting mired in details was distracting us. This epiphany dawned at a chicken shack place in Middle Georgia that sat next to an old gas station. We fumbled with greasy fingers to record our experiences, getting odd looks from fellow customers and the women behind the counter—the very people we wanted to connect with. In Atlanta our food tour schedule was packed with too many restaurants, and the places we had chosen to visit seemed too controlled. So we stopped relying on critics’ lists of places we needed to visit, chefs we needed to watch, foodie experiences we needed to have. We decided just to eat, to listen, and to let the whole weird experience wash over us. There were more spontaneous stops along the roadside, and fewer reservation-heavy New South restaurants.

Fundamental questions started to emerge. What the heck was Southern food? And what, for that matter, was being Southern? We had started with a sense of what made a dish “real,” and had set out to find eating experiences that fit our definition. When our approach changed, our definition of authenticity began to shift, too. We saw many Souths, many kinds of Southerners, and many foods and experiences that could count as “real.” Was a Southern meal defined by particular foods, like BBQ, fried chicken, and grits? We had imagined our research would focus on discovering the boundaries circumscribing Southern cuisine, but instead we found a food culture in flux. Southern food doesn’t belong to a certain region; its reach extends beyond the traditional South and can be hard to determine. Ashli’s definition of real Southern barbecue is the vinegar-y (with a touch of tomato) pulled pork you find in Piedmont North Carolina. Wendy’s is beef brisket and sausages. Appalachian soup beans are very different than shrimp and grits. All of these foods are Southern.

Collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and carrots served up at Homestyle, housed in a trailer outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Photo by Wendy Atkins-Sayre.

So, we learned, is chorizo. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a Sav-Way grocery in one formerly industrial neighborhood now serves an immensely popular torta made with the sausage, at a lunch counter in the back. An expanding immigrant community in the South has brought countless additions to old recipes. Hummus, a traditionally Middle Eastern dish, has found its way to highbrow Southern tables in the form of mashed boiled peanuts, field peas, or Lima beans. Sandra Gutierrez, food writer and cookbook author, draws on Latin American traditions and adds a Southern twist. Chiles rellenos can be stuffed with pimiento cheese for a Southern flair.

There’s a long tradition of Southerners incorporating ingredients that are abundantly available but not necessarily “authentic” to the region in their food, such as casserole staples like Velveeta cheese and cream of mushroom soup. The Stokes family’s holiday shrimp mold, combining crustaceans with canned tomato soup, gelatin, celery, onion, and cream cheese is one such example of old-school Southern food with alien origins. As Ashli’s mother-in-law explained, it has to be served with Ritz crackers and it has to be served at Christmas. It does not matter that combining shrimp with gelatin might seem weird. Chorizo in Charlotte may one day be the same kind of thing. Oddball dishes become Southern food when they make their way into family traditions and stories. They send messages about family, about togetherness, about defining who you are in your corner of the world.

We found ourselves moving away from concentrating on the boundaries of Southern food and instead let the food speak for itself, experiencing everything from the Homestyle Restaurant, housed in a trailer home in the piney woods outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to a Popeye’s franchise in Jennings, Louisiana. We learned to let the people we met define the food for us. It became less important to define Southern cuisine and more important to embrace all that is—and wants to be—Southern. Southern food more broadly defined gives us all something to discuss, and even celebrate.

Some have opined that Southern food is in danger of extinction because of changes in the region, including increases in the numbers of chain restaurants, and the general suburbanization of so many Southern towns. But our travels revealed that a vibrant and evolving regional food culture brings people together and unites them, whether through a shared love of certain dishes or even heated arguments inspired by food loyalties. That Southern cuisine is moving forward by blending its own traditional ingredients and methods with those of other cultures, regions and times—and, even, taking root in chain restaurants—is a nod to its roots and a sign of breaking ground, a demonstration of how the South itself can become stronger while also changing.

Southern food may, in fact, both reflect current regional changes and also lead the way in crafting a new South, one where its culture echoes its changing people—more inclusive, more diverse, and more hopeful, influenced by influxes of immigrants, and newly fast-paced Southern cities. Optimistic, yes, but possible. The South is still here, but maybe not the one you, or we, were expecting.

The post Our Revelatory Culinary Road Trip Through the New South appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Americans went nuts for the 567-page volume, buying The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in numbers the publishing industry had never seen—around 360,000 copies by the time author Fannie Farmer died in 1915. Home cooks in the United States loved the tastiness and inventiveness of Farmer’s recipes. They also appreciated her methodical approach to cooking, which spoke to the unique conditions they faced. Farmer’s recipes were gratifyingly precise, and unprecedentedly replicable, perfect for Americans with newfangled gadgets like standardized cup and spoon measures, who worked in relative isolation from the friends and family who had passed along cooking knowledge in generations past. Farmer’s book popularized the modern recipe format, and it was a fitting guide to food and home life in a modernizing country.

Recipes today serve many purposes, from documenting cooking techniques, to showing off a creator’s skills, to serving up leisure reading for the food-obsessed. But their most important goal is replicability. A good recipe imparts enough information to let a cook reproduce a dish, in more or less the same form, in the future.

The earliest surviving recipes, which give instructions for a series of meaty stews, are inscribed on cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Recipes also survive from ancient Egypt, Greece, China, and Persia. For millennia, however, most people weren’t literate and never wrote down cooking instructions. New cooks picked up knowledge by watching more experienced friends and family at work, in the kitchen or around the fire, through looking, listening, and tasting.

Cover of 1919 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries.

Recipes, as a format and genre, only really began coming of age in the 18th century, as widespread literacy emerged. This was around the same time, of course, that the United States came into its own as a country. The first American cookbook, American Cookery, was published in 1796. Author Amelia Simmons copied some of her text from an English cookbook but also wrote sections that were wholly new, using native North American ingredients like “pompkins,” “cramberries,” and “Indian corn.” Simmons’s audience was mainly middle class and elite women, who were more likely to be able to read and who could afford luxuries like a printed book in the first place.

The reach of both handwritten recipes and cookbooks would expand steadily in the coming decades, and rising literacy was only one reason. Nineteenth-century Americans were prodigiously mobile. Some had emigrated from other countries, some relocated from farms to cities, and others moved from settled urban areas to the Western frontier. Young Americans regularly found themselves living far from friends and relatives who otherwise might have offered help with cooking questions. In response, mid-19th-century cookbooks attempted to offer comprehensive household advice, giving instructions not just on cooking but on everything from patching old clothes to caring for the sick to disciplining children. American authors routinely styled their cookbooks as “friends” or “teachers”—that is, as companions that could provide advice and instruction to struggling cooks in the most isolated of spots.

Americans’ mobility also demonstrated how easily a dish—or even a cuisine—could be lost if recipes weren’t written down. The upheaval wrought by the Civil War singlehandedly tore a hole in one of the most important bodies of unwritten American culinary knowledge: pre-war plantation cookery. After the war, millions of formerly enslaved people fled the households where they had been compelled to live, taking their expertise with them. Upper-class Southern whites often had no idea how to light a stove, much less how to produce the dozens of complicated dishes they had enjoyed eating, and the same people who had worked to keep enslaved people illiterate now rued the dearth of written recipes. For decades after the war, there was a boom in cookbooks, often written by white women, attempting to approximate antebellum recipes.

Title page of Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, by Catharine Beecher, 1862. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries.

Standardization of weights and measures, driven by industrial innovation, also fueled the rise of the modern American recipe. For most of the 19th century, recipes usually consisted of only a few sentences giving approximate ingredients and explaining basic procedure, with little in the way of an ingredient list and with nothing resembling precise guidance on quantities, heat, or timing. The reason for such imprecision was simple: There were no thermometers on ovens, few timepieces in American homes, and scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.

Recipe writers in the mid-19th century struggled to express ingredient quantity, pointing to familiar objects to estimate how much of a certain item a dish needed. One common approximation, for instance, was “the weight of six eggs in sugar.” They also struggled to give instructions on temperature, sometimes advising readers to gauge an oven’s heat by putting a hand inside and counting the seconds they could stand to hold it there. Sometimes they hardly gave instructions at all. A typically vague recipe from 1864 for “rusks,” a dried bread, read in its entirety: “One pound of flour, small piece of butter big as an egg, one egg, quarter pound white sugar, gill of milk, two great spoonfuls of yeast.”

By the very end of the 19th century, American home economics reformers, inspired by figures like Catharine Beecher, had begun arguing that housekeeping in general, and cooking in particular, should be more methodical and scientific, and they embraced motion studies and standardization measures that were redefining industrial production in this era. And that was where Fannie Merritt Farmer, who started working on The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in the 1890s, entered the picture.

Farmer was an unlikely candidate to transform American cookery. As a teenager in Boston in the 1870s, she suffered a sudden attack of paralysis in her legs, and she was 30 years old before she regained enough mobility to begin taking classes at the nearby Boston Cooking School. Always a lover of food, Farmer proved to be an indomitable student with a knack for sharing knowledge with others. The school hired her as a teacher after she graduated. Within a few years, by the early 1890s, she was its principal.

Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie. Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen is on view in the exhibition FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000, at the National Museum of American History. Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Farmer started tinkering with a book published by her predecessor a few years earlier, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book. Farmer had come to believe that rigorous precision made cooking more satisfying and food more delicious, and her tinkering soon turned into wholesale revision.

She called for home cooks to obtain standardized teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, and her recipes called for ultra-precise ingredient amounts such as seven-eighths of a teaspoon of salt, and four and two-thirds cups of flour. Also, crucially, Farmer insisted that all quantities be measured level across the top of the cup or spoon, not rounded in a changeable dome, as American cooks had done for generations.

This attention to detail, advocated by home economists and given life by Farmer’s enthusiasm, made American recipes more precise and reliable than they ever had been, and the wild popularity of Farmer’s book showed how eager home cooks were for such guidance. By the start of the 20th century, instead of offering a few prosy sentences that gestured vaguely toward ingredient amounts, American recipes increasingly began with a list of ingredients in precise, numerical quantities: teaspoons, ounces, cups.

In more than a century since, it’s a format that has hardly changed. American cooks today might be reading recipes online and trying out metric scales, but the American recipe format itself remains extraordinarily durable. Designed as a teaching tool for a mobile society, the modern recipe is grounded in principles of clarity, precision, and replicability that emerge clearly from the conditions of early American life. They are principles that continue to guide and empower cooks in America and around the world today.

The post How Recipe Cards and Cookbooks Fed a Mobile, Modernizing America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.