How many people here own a cookbook? Yeah, you might even own more than one.
That's true of most people. In any audience where I would ask this question, pretty much everyone owns a cookbook. They're pretty ubiquitous in our kitchens these days.
But I want to show you that your cookbooks are more than just lists of instructions for how to cook your next meal. Your cookbooks are, in fact, deeply judgmental stories, telling you that you are not already good enough at doing mundane household tasks.
I'm Dr Rachel Rich, I'm a historian at Leeds Beckett University and Co-editor of the journal Food and History. I've been researching and writing about cookbooks for over 20 years.
And today, I want to take you on a journey through the history of cookbooks, stepping back to the 19th century when cookbooks first became such a popular genre in our homes, and then moving us back to the present day and to some of the cookbooks that you might have on your shelves right now.
And I want to show you some of the stories that you may not realise have been hidden inside your cookbooks all along.
If cookbooks were just simple instructions for how to cook your next meal, they wouldn't need to have an introduction. You don't actually need to know that Jamie Oliver grew up in a pub in order to cook his pasta dishes. So why does he want to tell you so much about that?
It's because that's his aspirational story, and each of your cookbooks has an aspirational story for you where if you follow those rules, you might end up with the same beautiful happy ending that Jamie Oliver feels that his lifestyle demonstrates.
You could be the hero of the Choose Your Own adventure story.
But the reason why cookbooks can tell you these kinds of stories is because the food that we eat really gets to the heart of who we think we are.
We've all heard that saying you are what you eat. The food that we eat is really deeply connected to our sense of class, of gender, of ethnic and of national identities.
In the 1950s, cookbook writer Dorothy Hartley certainly thought so. She wrote a book called Food in England, and she subtitled it A Complete Guide to the Food That Makes Us Who We Are.
So does that mean that if you eat the wrong foods or in the wrong ways, it will actually change the very essence of who you are? Well, yeah. That is actually the subtext there.
So the food that we eat is really tied to who we are. And that means that our cookbooks can play on all our fears, our anxieties about getting things wrong. But when did that start?
When did we start letting these judgmental books into our homes? Well, to make sense of that, we have to think back to the 19th century.
Britain in the 19th century was going through a period of tremendous change.
The industrial revolution and conquest and colonisation around the world was creating immense and vast wealth in Britain. And this vast wealth led to the rise of the middle class. This middle class, this new class of people had disposable income and they also were very educated and literate.
They were exactly the kind of people who want to buy books in order to learn new things. And one of the things they wanted to learn was how to behave well in the world they lived in. So they bought self help or how to books of all sorts.
They bought books about how to choose your next home and how to get stains out of your carpets. And they bought books about how to raise your children and what to plant in your garden. But maybe above all else, they bought books of recipes.
They bought cookbooks of all sorts.
Well, yeah, you're thinking that makes a lot of sense because cooking is quite hard and you need to learn how to do it somehow. But I wonder how many people in this room actually first learn to cook from reading about it in a book.
Yeah, we don't learn to cook from reading about it in books. Most people learn to cook first and foremost at home. You learn from watching your parents or your grandparents preparing meals.
Maybe eventually someone asked you to help with some baking or some chopping. Maybe you're doing that with your own children nowadays, if you have any. Cooking is a very practical skill which we learn from doing rather than from reading.
So there must be another reason why cookbooks are so popular and we own so many of them. And that reason is aspiration. So these new affluent middle classes in the 19th century, they found themselves in new social situations.
They needed to host dinner parties, for example, in new environments, and their own mother's cooking hadn't necessarily prepared them for that.
But it wasn't just the cooking, it was the whole kit and kaboodle of how you run your home from the time you wake up in the morning until eventually you get dinner onto the table.
We also live in a rapidly changing world. We are also constantly bombarded with new information about what's fashionable to serve at your next dinner party, about what's the healthiest food for your children, about the latest technologies like air fryers.
We are also looking for instructions. So no wonder we also buy so many cookbooks.
If you'd been around in the 19th century, you might have owned a cookbook written by a young woman in her 20s named Isabella Beeton.
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management became one of the bestselling cookbooks in the English language ever. And Mrs Beeton had a great story to tell in her cookbook.
On the first page, she addresses herself directly to a reader, the mistress of the house. And she says that “to be the mistress of a house, to get dinner on the table, is like being the commander of an army or the leader of a great enterprise.”
What a story. This is off to a great start. This is going to be a story with a hero who triumphs. But wait, does that mean that you're always and inevitably the hero of all your cookbooks?
It's not quite that simple because remember, this is a choose your own adventure type story, so you're going to be making choices along the way, Mrs Beeton warns you. She says “I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
She doesn't need to name you when she says it, because she knows that right away you will realise that you're guilty of at least the possibility of making that mistake.
And what happens if you, poor Victorian housewife that you are, produce badly cooked dinners and have untidy ways?
Well, of course your husband will stop coming home. He'll have dinner at his club, or he'll meet friends in a restaurant, and slowly but inevitably, your family will fall into ruin.
If only you had followed those recipes more carefully, you might be thinking, well, that's a bit harsh, but those were the Victorians.
Nowadays, it doesn't all rest on the shoulders of the women to do the cooking. There are plenty of men who do housework and plenty of men who cook family dinners. So does that mean that our worry and guilt about badly cooked dinners and untidy ways has gone away for good?
I'd say not. I'd say we've just spread it a little bit more fairly amongst a greater number of people.
In fact, there are two storylines that run really predominantly through Mrs Beeton's book and that I think continue to run through the cookbooks that you might have on your shelves right now.
One of those is a story about love. Now, we don't necessarily see that in Mrs Beeton because the language has changed a lot. So Mrs Beeton had a language of a warning about family ruin.
Nowadays people have flipped that language and they talk about love. So it's a more positive message, but I think it works in roughly the same way.
The other thing Mrs Beeton was very keen on was time keeping. Mrs Beaton told you what time to wake up in the morning, when to feed your children, what time to change for dinner, and she even told you how long it was appropriate to spend speaking to your friends in the afternoon because she knew the time was scarce and you have to use it wisely.
Now this time narrative, which I also think of as a stress motif, it still runs through a lot of our cookbooks. It makes a lot of sense because cooking is a very time precise activity and you're thinking about time all the time when you're cooking.
But actually our cookbook writers, they think about time in a harsher way, I would say. But let's think about love first.
Some people here may have heard of Stanley Tucci. Stanley Tucci is an actor turned cookbook writer and Stanley Tucci is very strong on the love narrative. Stanley Tucci in the introduction to his book tells us how much he loves his children.
He loves his children, he loves his nieces and nephews. He loves his whole family. Stanley Tucci loves his family so much that he went out and bought a bigger house with a bigger kitchen. And he filled that kitchen with all the best appliances that money could buy us. Pretty loving of him. I bet his food tastes really good.
But what if you can't afford a bigger house with a bigger kitchen and you can't afford all those appliances? Probably you just don't love your kids enough.
Skye McAlpine is another cookbook writer who's very keen on the love narrative. She called her cookbook A Table Full of Love, and it has a subtitle. She says she's offering you food to comfort, to nourish and to seduce.
Now, I'm going to leave seduction to one side today, but I think that for most of us who've ever cooked a meal for anyone, at the very least, we already thought that we were nourishing the people at our table.
But maybe not. Because if you read the introduction to this book, you will go away feeling like your love wasn't already quite up to scratch. And until you can translate your love into Skye McAlpine's recipes, maybe you just weren't trying hard enough.
Alongside the love narrative is, of course, the stress motif. Jamie Oliver is quite keen on time keeping. Jamie first taught us how to cook dinners in 30 minutes, even 15 minutes. He really wants you to feel that time is money in the kitchen.
In his book, Simply Jamie, Jamie Oliver says that time is right now our most valuable currency. And so he says that whatever your skill level as a cook, when you're restricted on time, you just need to be smarter. Thanks, Jamie.
A lot of us work a full time job. We go home, maybe we have to help a kid with homework, phone an elderly parent. And then even with all that going on, we still manage to put some food on the table at the end of every day.
But Jamie is saying that if that food isn't up to his standard, it's because we're not being smart enough.
One cookbook writer who seems at first glance to have really transcended that stress motif is Nigella Lawson. Nigella Lawson is a very beloved recipe writer in Britain, and she is so luscious. She's so elegant and effortlessly beautiful.
In her kitchen, she shows you how to host a dinner party where you sit around chatting to your friends and suddenly you just whip out a tray of perfectly roasted chicken without even breaking a sweat.
Now, the Victorians would have seen right through that if Mrs Beeton knew one thing. She knew that cooking and getting dinner on the table at the right time when everyone's actually hungry for it is a job. She literally said it was like taking your troops into battle.
But Nigella says sometimes we don't feel like being a postmodern, post feminist, overstretched woman. No, we just feel like being a Domestic Goddess. Really, Nigella, a goddess sounds hard to me.
At the beginning I said to you that your cookbooks contain all sorts of stories. These stories judge you. They have to judge you because you would not keep buying cookbook after cookbook if the last one you bought had already solved your lifestyle problems.
You need to feel inadequate so that you will keep spending money trying to get better. So does that mean that if you don't like the judgement in your cookbook, you should just throw them all away?
I don't think that's the solution. I really like a lot of my cookbooks and I do like trying new recipes and learning how to cook new things.
But the next time you pick up one of your cookbooks, remember this cookbooks are really like fairy tales. And in fairy tales, the happily ever after, whether that's a more elegant you or a healthier you or a more time efficient you, that's all just fantasy.
But don't worry, you can still use your cookbooks to cook something great for dinner tonight.
Thank you.
