Andrew F. Smith

Cookbooks: To 1860

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
“I greatly suspect that some of the Pilgrim Fathers must have come over to this country with the Cookery book under one arm and the Bible under the other.” There is a kernel of truth in this observation by an English visitor to America in 1836; early settlers carried manuscript and printed cookbooks with them to the New World. American archives contain hundreds of manuscript cookery books, which have yet to be thoroughly examined and cataloged.

Once the immigrants arrived in the New World, they purchased and collected European—especially English, Dutch, and German—cookbooks. The contributions of the foodstuffs and cooking techniques of the indigenous population, although ubiquitous, most often went unrecorded and unacknowledged in culinary archives. Native Americans’ culinary contributions during this period must be gleaned from exploration and discovery literature and from letters and diaries.