Linsey Middleton
Published: 21 January 2019
‘The Technical Recipe: A Formal Analysis of 19th Century Food Writing’.
University of Glasgow
‘The Technical Recipe: A Formal Analysis of 19th Century Food Writing’.
I will read cookbooks like Martha Brotherton’s Vegetable Cookery and Elizabeth Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families alongside recipes in periodicals and archives. I will consider how recipes relate to other forms, including catalogues, magazines, novels, and short stories. Attending to the recipe as a genre of writing, I will illuminate its cultural influence beyond the kitchen.
Combining diverse methodologies, I argue that recipes have both aesthetic and practical aims: recipes demonstrate how consumerist ideology was resisted and supported by a utilitarian aesthetic, and how that aesthetic was adopted by other literary genres. My interdisciplinary approach revises scholarship by drawing on the history of technology. I investigate how the formal qualities of recipes reflect changes in technology and domestic space. Tracing recipes through the nineteenth century will show how the form incorporates procedures for food preservation and cooking and changes in printing technology.
First published: 21 January 2019