Introduction

by Joyce Toomre

All cookbooks start as manuals of instruction, but some develop an extra richness as they age. In such books, it is the asides or the glimpses of another culture that come to captivate us as much as their antiquated directions for frying an egg or roasting a pig. Embedded in the language of every recipe are assumptions about the reader and his or her milieu, skills, and resources. A collection of recipes is even more informative, both for what it includes and for what it omits. Recipes are rooted in time and space; essentially static, they function as snapshots of a culture. Like translations, they usually serve the needs of a particular group of people in a particular locale. With rare exceptions, they do not move easily from place to place or from one generation to another.