Defining California through American Cookbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Stephanie Maroney
Cultural Studies
UC Davis

This project examined the ways that California cuisine is constructed at the intersection of Mexican, Spanish, and “American” tastes as found in a collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cookbooks. In the field of food studies, foodstuffs and food practices are rich sites of research in order to explore the effects of cultural encounters and clashes. California is a place of multiple cultural convergences, and this project explored the emergence of California cuisine in the period between 1840 and 1950. The Los Angeles Public Library has the largest collection in the world of cookbooks printed in California. It is the only library that owns all three of California’s first charitable books including The California Recipe Book, printed in 1872. The over-1000-book collection also includes an original copy of El Cocinero Espanol, the first Spanish-language cookbook printed in California. Within these cookbooks, one can track the emergence of ingredients, cooking methods, recipes, and regional names that come to be associated with modern California cuisine. This process of historical tracking through cookbooks can reveal the multiple ways in which dominant and subordinate groups mediated the often uncomfortable process of cultural encounter.