Definition
Cookbooks served as more than recipe collections for nineteenth-century readers. Cookbooks formed a lucrative publishing market for upwardly mobile middle-class women tasked with managing a household. Cookbooks provided instructions for buying food, managing a household budget, caring for ill relatives, preparing meals, and hiring domestic staff. Cookbooks illuminated women’s relationships with food and domesticity and created a middle-class culinary identity impacted by new technologies, methods of transportation, and upward social mobility. Many women learned foreign and domestic foods from reading cookbooks; these works also urged British women living abroad to keep current with imperial efforts by promoting native diets and standards of domesticity. Cookbooks provided a starting point for middle-class women to learn about domestic matters in increasingly modernized environments.
Introduction
Since recipes and household management advice were typically passed down...
References
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Hakimi-Hood, H. (2019). Cookbooks. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_88-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_88-1
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