Project Mission - lizziehop/reading-cookbooks GitHub Wiki

Reading Cookbooks: Tastemaking in the Atlantic Kitchen

Reading Cookbooks is an open-access, digital critical editions of cookbooks from the Atlantic world spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A digital critical edition is throws a spotlight on foodways as an interdisciplinary field of study. The pilot cookbooks have previously been are digitized and available via archive.org and Loyola’s University Archives and Special Collections Special Collections, and this project seeks to offer a critical apparatus for better understanding the history and socio-cultural contexts of how these books were printed and used. To do so, the team is using XML markup (using adapted guidelines from the Text Encoding Initiative, a standard in the Humanities fields) on these cookbooks that includes rich interpretive metadata and develop a methodology of reading them critically and as important literary-historical textual objects. Such a methodology involves moving away from just reading cookbooks as simple instructional texts, fixed, didactic and instead argues that these books manuals and instead their roles as documents that reflect and shape taste-making at a time when community and /national formation across the U.S, England, and the Caribbean was in flux.