Culinary History vs. Food History: Differences Bridged

Many academic food historians are apt to be dismissive of culinary historians, whose examination of recipes and concern with hands-on cooking often strikes academics as more “womanish” than scholarly. Yet, without a real sense of what is involved in the preparation of a dish—the labor, the techniques of cooking, and the knowledge of ingredients and their history—professional scholars run the risk of making serious errors of fact and interpretation. Ingredients that are familiar to cooks, such as nasturtiums in salads or candied violets in cake decorating, may strike scholars as unusual and exotic. Or they may not have a grasp of the amount of work that was involved in preparing meals in nineteenth-century American kitchens, knowledge that would provide a fuller understanding of why, for example, ordinary families employed servants. In time it may be universally recognized that an understanding of how food is cooked and eaten is indispensable to the proper study of food. When that happens, employing the terms “food historian” and “culinary historian” will seem like making a distinction without a difference, and research on food by academic and independent scholars will become even richer and deeper as well as more accurate.