Cookbooks Worth Collecting: The History and Lore of Notable Cookbooks, with Complete Bibliographic Listings and Up-to-date Values

by Mary Barile, Mary Barele

Offers tips on starting a collection, gathering information, and locating mail-order sources, and looks at the history of cookbooks from ancient Rome to the nineteenth century

Genres: Cookbooks

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

Reviews

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know if there have been more recent versions of this 1994 book. It’s very dated now, and even in 1994 it may have been already dated: The Bralley Memorial Library that she recommended visiting at Texas Woman’s University had already been transferred to the university’s Blagg-Huey Library in 1986 if I’m reading various archives correctly. It would be “destroyed” only two years later, in 1996.

There’s a list of what are, as far as I can tell, a representative sample of her own collection to provide examples of what you can expect to pay for various collectible cookbooks. Judging from the handful of books that are also in my collection, the used cookbook market, like the used book market in general, has mostly crashed. I suspect that the really old ones, such as a first edition of Amelia Simmons’s 1796 An American Cookery, have retained their value. But most of them, if they’ve gone up at all, it is only because they were fairly new at the time, such as Cooking with Wholegrains.

To read a cookbook from any era is to discover the varying philosophies that affected daily life: the trends, the fads, the development of scientific rules for healthy diets, even the religious beliefs that found their way into the story of American food.

This would thus be a very different book today: cookbook collecting must be much more of a labor of love than the combined labor of love and investment opportunity she viewed it as. Even when she wrote it, she must have recognized that some of the ephemera she was talking about were not really insurable. You might be able to get some money from the insurance company, but you weren’t going to be able to replace them.

The examples in the book are focused especially on such books as she can provide examples of. This means the famous editions (such as American Cookery) that are represented in museums, and the books she has in her collection. This makes the book appear to be very similar to one of the blind men at the elephant. One surprise in the bibliography is that she has Jinx Kragen’s and Judy Perry’s How to Keep Him After You’ve Caught Him, which I thought was a joke at the end of their earlier Saucepans and the Single Girl. She even mentions this book in the text, as “a tongue-in-cheek look at married life and how to smooth its edges with food”, which completely misses the book’s context as a sequel to a book about how to trap a man with food.

That said, that aspect of it is also the most interesting. It’s very personal. This is sort of a meandering walk through the cookbooks that have struck her fancy with some historically important ones thrown in. And even those are interesting. The overview of the nineteenth century is very breezy and interesting.

There is no sense of what guides her purchases, despite her generally good advice to prospective collectors that:

Collectors of charity cookbooks, more than other collectors, tend to let themselves become overwhelmed by their books, since there are so many on the market, and the temptation to add just one more is difficult to resist.

I can definitely attest to that.

She also talks a little about what the collection will be for, both to give advice on how to store books as well as use them, and what kind of damage to expect in the marketplace.

A cookbook’s unique function as a reference book for the kitchen rather than the library presents a special challenge to the collector.

I would have liked even more tips on how to determine when a cookbook or pamphlet was published; she does mention that advertisements are useful—and occasionally even mention years. One common advertisement was for Baker’s Chocolate. They updated their ad every year to update the phrase “For more than xxx years…”. They were founded in 1780, so you can do the math if you see that ad in one of your books. I happened to see it in a book I just picked up recently, and which gave its year as 1916. The ad said “For more than 135 years”, 1780+135 is 1915, plus 1 for “more than” and you’ve got 1916. So it appears that that tip is at least somewhat reliable.

It seems like there are other things that could be included in this chapter, though, such as when some ingredients were introduced to the market (chocolate chips are very recent, hartshorn is very old) and when some brand names commonly used in ingredient lists were introduced to the market.

Also potentially very useful is her list of “Measurements from Old Cookbooks”

Some of them cry out for more explanation. For example, “2 teaspoons” is listed as equalling “1 dessert spoon” but “2 dessert spoons” is listed as equalling “1 tablespoon”. This can only be true if (a) you’re Australian or (b) this is a great example of the vagueness of old cookbook measurements (or it’s a liquid: she also says that 3 teaspoons of dry is a tablespoon but 4 teaspoons of liquid are). But it goes unexplained, which makes the math in some of them difficult.

For example, her only definition of a saltspoon is that “2 saltspoons” are “1 coffee spoon”. Her only definition of a coffee spoon is that “2 coffee spoons” is “1 teaspoon”. Doing the math would mean that a saltspoon is ¼ teaspoon (which is in fact what I use in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book). But if doubling up changes the amount, or what’s in the spoon changes the amount, no math is possible.

Another example is that “1 lemon” is listed as “1 teaspoon strained juice”. Are these very small lemons? Does straining really reduce the amount of liquid that much? Or is there some other meaning hidden here?

Possibly it’s the elephant rearing its nose again, but she lists “isinglass or hartshorn” as “unflavored gelatin”, which could lead an uninformed reader very astray. Hartshorn is also a very common term in old cookbooks for an old dry leavening agent, like baking powder. Replacing it with gelatin in such a recipe is likely to be a disappointment.

Still, it looks like it will be very helpful, although the first time I used it (to make a date pudding from the aforementioned 1916 cookbook) I discovered that it does not contain a small cup.

There’s also a slightly larger list of can sizes than in other books, which ought to be helpful, too.

There is something very satisfying about sitting down in a cozy kitchen with a cup of tea and a cookbook from a prior age; perhaps it is the feeling that cooks can still talk to each other, and their feelings and tastes can cross the centuries.

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the history of cookbooks very interesting and covered a wide range of the different types of cookbooks available. The price guide is no longer accurate but the list of books collectors look for and the bibliography is good. It would be great if this could get an update for a new edition.

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

love cookbook bibliography!

[P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and well written reference book that is also a fun read if you like to cook or collect cookbooks.