Historian's Toolkit

Reconstructing History Through Recipes and Food Traditions

Food is far more than sustenance—it is memory, identity, ritual, resistance, and survival. For historians, recipes and culinary traditions offer a rich and often underutilized lens through which to explore everyday life, power structures, global exchange, and cultural continuity. In the historian’s toolkit, food history can be both deeply human and analytically robust, providing texture and intimacy to grand narratives.

Why Food Matters in Historical Research

Histories of war, empire, migration, and revolution often hinge on material culture, yet food—arguably one of the most universal material experiences—has long been relegated to the margins of scholarship. That is changing.

Culinary sources reveal:

• Everyday life often overlooked in official records
• Social hierarchies, including class, gender, and labor
• Economic systems, from subsistence to global trade
• Cultural identity and resistance (e.g., enslaved people’s foodways, diasporic cuisines)
• Environmental history, including crop selection, climate shifts, and land use

As historian Rachel Laudan writes, “The past is written in bread and butter as surely as in steel and stone.”

Types of Historical Culinary Sources

Cookbooks and Recipe Manuscripts

Published or handwritten recipes can serve as primary sources reflecting values, access to ingredients, health beliefs, and culinary transmission. Examples include:

• The Forme of Cury (England, 14th century)
• La Cuisinière Bourgeoise (France, 1746)
• Plantation recipe books from the U.S. South
• 20th-century Soviet household manuals

When reading historical recipes, remember they were often written without exact quantities, assuming communal or domestic knowledge. Gaps are interpretive opportunities.

Oral Histories and Community Cookbooks

Oral traditions and community-authored cookbooks (e.g., church or immigrant association publications) often document marginalized histories and collective memory. They reflect:

• Adaptations to new geographies or limited resources
• Preservation of ethnic or familial identity
• Culinary memory passed matrilineally

Example: The “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine” collection (1978) preserves African American family recipes alongside family histories and cultural reflections.

Archaeological and Material Sources

Pottery shards with residue, kitchen tools, charred grains, or animal bones excavated from historical sites can reveal:

• What people ate and how they cooked
• Socioeconomic differences in diet
• Trade networks and domesticated crops

Food archaeologists combine chemical analysis with historical records to reconstruct historical foodways—sometimes down to regional cooking techniques.

Step-by-Step: Reconstructing a Historical Recipe

Reconstructing history through food isn’t just reading—it can be experimental, performative, and even sensory.

Step 1 – Select a Recipe with a Context

Avoid isolated recipes. Choose those embedded in a social, historical, or cultural moment. Example: A Jewish Passover dish recorded in a 1930s German family cookbook offers insights into both tradition and looming displacement.

Step 2 – Translate and Decode

Many older recipes are in archaic languages or formats. Consider:

• Translation (linguistic and culinary—what is “butter the size of an egg”?)
• Ingredient substitution (when items are extinct or unavailable)
• Cooking methods (open hearth vs. electric oven)

Resources such as the Oxford Companion to Food or digitized historical dictionaries can help decode unfamiliar terminology.

Step 3 – Contextualize the Recipe

Ask:

• Who wrote or used it?
• What was its intended audience (elite vs. working-class)?
• What was its geographic and temporal context?
• What broader histories does it touch—colonialism, labor, gender roles?

You might explore how a West African rice dish transformed in the Americas due to the transatlantic slave trade, morphing into dishes like jambalaya or Gullah rice.

Step 4 – (Optionally) Recreate It

For public historians, educators, or museum curators, cooking historical recipes is a form of embodied storytelling. Cooking becomes an experiential archive. When recreating:

• Note your adaptations and why they were necessary
• Document the process (photos, sensory notes, audience feedback)
• Reflect on gaps: what you don’t know, and what that absence reveals

Real-Life Use Cases

Food as Resistance: The Story of the Tortilla

In post-revolutionary Mexico, state officials promoted wheat bread as modern and “European,” while corn tortillas were considered backward. Women continued to make and consume tortillas, turning them into symbols of indigenous pride and culinary resistance. Examining family recipes, street vendor practices, and political cartoons about food reveals tensions between modernity and tradition.

Wartime Rationing and Culinary Innovation

British World War II rationing cookbooks (e.g., Victory Cookbook) reflect ingenuity during scarcity. Researchers use them to understand:

• Gender roles (women as “home front soldiers”)
• Propaganda and morale
• Public health outcomes (ironically, malnutrition decreased)

Reconstructing these recipes highlights how policy intersects with the domestic sphere.

Tools and Resources

Digital Archives

Feeding America (MSU): 76 digitized American cookbooks from 1798 to 1922

Manuscript Cookbooks Survey: U.S. and U.K. handwritten recipe books

Historical Culinary Library (Harvard): Rare cookbooks and food ephemera

Europeana: EU-wide food culture archives and digitized materials

Academic and Public History References

• Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food
• Wallach, Jennifer. How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
• Earle, Rebecca. Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato

Tools for Experimentation

Narrative tools: Combine recipes with interviews or letters in exhibits

Museums/libraries: Offer “cooking the archives” programs (e.g., NYPL)

Podcasts: Gastropod, Burnt Toast, and The Secret Ingredient explore food and history intersections

Ethical and Methodological Considerations

Cultural sensitivity: Don’t treat traditional recipes as curiosities or novelties

Appropriation vs. documentation: Give credit and seek permissions for republishing recipes from oral or community sources

Representativeness: A recipe doesn’t speak for all people in a place or time—be wary of overgeneralization

Embodied bias: Your modern palate or cultural expectations will shape how you interpret or recreate a historical dish

Tasting the Past with Scholarly Rigor

Culinary history is not “flavorful trivia”—it’s a serious entry point into economic systems, migration, gender dynamics, ecological shifts, and cultural survival. Recipes and food traditions encode knowledge passed down across generations, sometimes in silence, sometimes in resistance.

To reconstruct history through food is to knead, stir, and taste the past. It is to encounter what people shared, celebrated, endured, and dreamed—at the table, in the kitchen, or over a communal fire. When approached with critical tools, contextual research, and human curiosity, culinary sources nourish not just bodies, but historical understanding.

Whether you’re curating an exhibit, writing a paper, or leading an oral history project, let food be part of your method—and part of the story you tell.