Ethnic groups brought cookbooks in various languages to the American colonies and began publishing foreign-language cookbooks early in the history of the United States. British cookbooks and manuscripts of the colonial period contained many dishes that were understood as “foreign” but were moving into the British mainstream, such as Irish stew, chutney, ketchup, soy sauce, the occasional curry, caveached fish (Iberian or West Indian), and many French recipes.
The first cookbook written by an American, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, was substantially taken from British sources but contained a group of recipes that emphasized American ingredients such as Indian corn and cranberries. The cookbook also used the Dutch American culinary terms “cookie” and “slaw,” suggesting that Simmons was influenced by the Dutch American minority, perhaps in upstate New York, where the second edition was published. By 1839 The Kentucky Housewife, by Lettice Bryan, had incorporated a Pennsylvania Dutch noodle recipe along with recipes from France and elsewhere. Around the same time, German-language almanacs and a few cookbooks were being printed in the United States for that community. Catharine Esther Beecher’s Domestic-Receipt Book added the recipe Bridget’s Bread Cake, a recognizable variant of Irish soda bread, in the 1850s. African American recipes had been appearing uncredited in southern cookbooks such as The Virginia House-Wife (1824) by Mary Randolph, and most apparently in The Carolina Housewife (1847). The latter contained recipes for an almost completely African peanut soup and sesame soup and for many uses of okra. It also contained the first Jewish recipe in a general American cookbook, Queen Esther’s bread, a version of french toast served for Purim. The 1851 revision of The Carolina Housewife added Caribbean pepper pot, New Orleans gumbo, an Indian dish called sofky (probably the first explicitly Native American dish in a general cookbook), and another fried dough recipe that probably came from the Jewish community of Charleston.
