Why Cookbooks?

Cookbooks are a major part of the publishing industry, with hundreds of new titles each year. But as recently as 200 years ago, most households wouldn’t have had a single cookbook. Nearly all cooks learned by apprenticeship (girls learned from their mothers), rather than from books. So why were cookbooks written at all in earlier times?

The very oldest recipes, written on Babylonian clay tablets 3,500 years ago, give detailed instructions whose point is a little hard to grasp. It’s been suggested that they were ritual dishes served to the rulers, or possibly to the gods in their temples, and were intentionally over-elaborate to distinguish them from everyday food.

But the next-oldest recipes, appearing in a Roman cookbook of about 1,800 years ago, show motivations that are still familiar. Some had supposed medical value--still a key to big cookbook sales.

Others provided ways for an ambitious host to impress guests. Some suggested the thrill of exoticism--”Numidian” (Algerian) chicken and so on. This last idea didn’t resurface again until the 19th century, but ethnic cookbooks are a major category today.

And some were supposedly favorite dishes of famous people. Later, in the Middle Ages, cookbooks would be a way for middle-class people and minor aristocrats to learn what the king was eating. Celebrity cookbooks are still big sellers. Today’s charitable cookbooks have a related appeal, the desire to learn the dishes fashionable in a particular community.

Only a few categories have been added since then. A 14th century Chinese medical cookbook included a number of Mongolian recipes to flatter the emperor, who was a Mongol. Today’s equivalent would be nostalgic down-home cookbooks.

The most recent categories have been responses to new kinds of readers: people who never learned to cook at home (the basic cookbook) and those with scarcely any time to cook (quick recipes), which is as far as you can get from the Babylonian approach.