United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook

by Keith Stavely, Kathleen Fitzgerald

The Library of Congress has designated American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons one of the eighty-eight "Books That Shaped America." Its recognition as "the first American cookbook" has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers, yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

Situating American Cookery within the post-Revolutionary effort to develop a distinct national identity, Stavely and Fitzgerald demonstrate the book's significance in cultural as well as culinary terms. Ultimately the separation between these categories dissolves as the authors show that the formation of "taste," in matters of food as well as other material expressions, was essential to building a consensus on what it was to be American. United Tastes explores multiple histories―of food, cookbooks, printing, material and literary culture, and region―to illuminate the meaning and affirm the importance of America's first cookbook.

Genres: Cookbooks

368 pages, Hardcover

Published November 16, 2017

About the author

Stavely is a writer and scholar whose interest in the Puritan influence on American and English culture has resulted in a number of critically-esteemed books and articles. He has been a Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellow and a winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars. He holds a B. A. and a Ph. D. in English Literature from Yale University and a Master of Library Science from Simmons College. He taught at Boston University, Boston College, and Ohio State University and worked for many years as a librarian in Massachusetts public libraries, retiring in 2008 as director of the Fall River Public Library. His earlier published works include The Politics of Milton’s Prose Style (Yale University Press, 1975), Family Man (Contemporary Books, 1978), and Puritan Legacies: Paradise Lost and the New England Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1987, pbk. 1990).