Bullock, Helen

Helen Duprey Bullock (1905–1995) was born in Oakland, California, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote widely about American history, but her unique contribution was to social history. In 1955 she wrote that “[h]istory isn’t just great political events. You can feel it in fabrics, taste it in cooking and see it in architecture” (The New York Times, November 11, 1995). It would be decades before other historians came to see the validity of this viewpoint.

Helen Bullock served as an archivist at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation during the 1920s and 1930s. For her first book, The Williamsburg Art of Cookery (1938), she compiled five hundred recipes from various sources, mainly E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife Or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion (1753) and Virginia Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824). The book was designed to resemble The Compleat Housewife (and appropriated its subtitle) and was letterpress printed on fine paper in Caslon Antique, a font that resembles an eighteenth-century typeface. On first glance the book appears to be a facsimile of a Colonial-era cookbook. The Williamsburg Art of Cookery was very popular and went through many printings, although experts criticized its content because not all of the recipes came from the Colonial period. Still, the work helped launch the field of American culinary history.