As you know if you’re a read­er of this site, there are vast, inter­ac­tive (and free!) schol­ar­ly data­bas­es online col­lect­ing just about every kind of arti­fact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of cook­books online, too. But prop­er search­able, his­tor­i­cal data­bas­es of cook­books seem to have appeared only late­ly. To my mind these might have been some of the first things to become avail­able. How impor­tant is eat­ing, after all, to vir­tu­al­ly every part of our lives? The fact is, how­ev­er, that schol­ars of food have had to invent the dis­ci­pline large­ly from scratch.

“West­ern schol­ars had a bias against study­ing sen­su­al expe­ri­ence,” writes Reina Gat­tuso at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the rel­ic of an Enlight­en­ment-era hier­ar­chy that con­sid­ered taste, touch, and fla­vor taboo top­ics for sober aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry. ‘It’s the baser sense,’ says Cathy Kauf­man, a pro­fes­sor of food stud­ies at the New School.” Kauf­man sits on the board of The Sifter, a new mas­sive, mul­ti-lin­gual online data­base of his­tor­i­cal recipe books. Anoth­er board mem­ber, sculp­tor Joe Wheaton, puts things more direct­ly: “Food his­to­ry has been a bit of an embar­rass­ment to a lot of aca­d­e­mics, because it involves women in the kitchen.”

Luck­i­ly for food schol­ars, the sit­u­a­tion has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly. There are now over 2,000 his­tor­i­cal Mex­i­can cook­books of all kinds online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas San Anto­nio, for exam­ple. (The UTSA is busy curat­ing and trans­lat­ing hun­dreds of those recipes into Eng­lish for what they call a “series of mini-cook­books.”)  And schol­ars of food his­to­ry may have to be pulled away by force from The Sifter, a vast, ever-expand­ing Wikipedia-like archive of food research.

The data­base col­lects “over 5,000 authors and 5,000 works with details about the authors and about the con­tents of the works,” the site explains. “The cen­tral doc­u­ments are cook­books and oth­er writ­ings relat­ed to get­ting, prepar­ing, and con­sum­ing food, and the activ­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with them, as well as writ­ings about cul­tur­al and moral atti­tudes.” Like Wikipedia, users are invit­ed to sub­mit their own data, which can be edit­ed by oth­er users. Unlike the pub­lic ency­clo­pe­dia, which we know has seri­ous flaws, The Sifter is over­seen by experts, and inspired by none oth­er than the expert Julia Child her­self, or at least by her library.

Although the Sifter does not con­tain actu­al texts or recipes, it does col­lect the bib­li­o­graph­ic data of thou­sands of such books, a trea­sury for schol­ars, researchers, and his­to­ri­ans. The pri­ma­ry force behind the project, Bar­bara Wheaton, was a neigh­bor of Julia Childs’ in the ear­ly 1960s and used Childs’ library and Har­vard University’s Schlesinger Library Culi­nary Col­lec­tion (where she is now an hon­orary cura­tor) to become “one of the best-known schol­ars of culi­nary his­to­ry.” Her sto­ry illus­trates how a recent wealth of culi­nary schol­ar­ship did not just sud­den­ly appear but has been ger­mi­nat­ing for decades. The Sifter is the result of “Wheaton’s 50 years of labor.”

Wheaton launched the site in July with the help of a team of schol­ars and her chil­dren, Joe and Cather­ine. The Sifter con­tains “more than a thou­sand years of Euro­pean and U.S. cook­books, from the medieval Latin De Re Culi­nar­ia, pub­lished in 800, to The Romance of Can­dy, a 1938 trea­tise on British sweets.” It also col­lects bib­li­o­graph­ic data on cook­books, in their orig­i­nal lan­guages, from around the world. Wheaton hopes The Sifter will gen­er­ate new areas of research into the his­to­ry of what may be at once the most uni­ver­sal of all human activ­i­ties and the most cul­tur­al­ly, region­al­ly, and his­tor­i­cal­ly par­tic­u­lar. Per­haps a sil­ver lin­ing of so many years of schol­ar­ly neglect is that there is now so much work for food his­to­ri­ans to do. Get start­ed at The Sifter here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of Hand­writ­ten Tra­di­tion­al Mex­i­can Cook­books Is Now Online

His­toric Mex­i­can Recipes Are Now Avail­able as Free Dig­i­tal Cook­books: Get Start­ed With Dessert

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Celebri­ties (those who are not pro­fes­sion­al celebri­ty chefs, that is) release cook­books at an alarm­ing rate. Do we imag­ine most of their recipes were actu­al­ly curat­ed by the per­son on the cov­er? Do we sup­pose that per­son has spent the count­less hours in the kitchen required to become an author­i­ty on what the rest of us should eat? As in all things, it depends.

Stan­ley Tuc­ci seems to have more than proven his met­tle, releas­ing two well-loved cook­books and earn­ing praise from Mario Batali. But I’d also take a chance on Snoop Dogg’s From Crook to Cook, which includes 50 of his own recipes, such as “baked mac and cheese and fried Bologna sand­wich­es with chips.” How could you go wrong?

Many a celebri­ty cook­book aims for the fine-din­ing approach famous peo­ple are used to get­ting from per­son­al chefs. But Snoop joins a long tra­di­tion of artists whose sig­na­ture dish­es are every­day com­fort foods and hol­i­day favorites. What­ev­er else he and Leo Tol­stoy might find to talk about, for exam­ple (use your imag­i­na­tion), they would sure­ly swap mac and cheese recipes.

Tolstoy’s recipe for mac and cheese is made on the stove­top, not baked, but it sounds deli­cious all the same, with its lay­ers of Parme­san cheese. Far more com­plex meals, fit for Russ­ian aris­to­crats, appear in The Cook­book, a col­lec­tion of Tol­stoy fam­i­ly recipes, though we can hard­ly imag­ine the Tol­stoy fam­i­ly did much of the cook­ing them­selves.

Not so with Miles Davis, who also uses Parme­san in a dish not usu­al­ly known to fea­ture the Ital­ian cheese. His chili—or rather “Miles’s South Side Chica­go Chili Mack”—sounds incred­i­bly rich in a recipe pub­lished in 2007. “I could cook most of the French dish­es,” Miles wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “and all the black Amer­i­can dish­es.” His skills in the kitchen were well attest­ed, though his per­son­al recipe book has been lost.

Oth­er celebri­ties like Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe also go with com­fort­ing old favorites. What appears in her recipe for turkey and stuff­ing (besides wal­nuts and no gar­lic… feel free to make sub­sti­tu­tions…)? That’s right, Parme­san cheese. If there’s a pat­tern in this rep­e­ti­tion, maybe it’s that the rest of us home cooks should do more with Parme­san cheese.

If you’re won­der­ing what kind of cheese Ernest Hem­ing­way puts on his favorite burg­er, the answer is none. Anoth­er celebri­ty cook who sure­ly did a good bit of his own cook­ing, Hem­ing­way asks a lot of those will­ing to take a chance on his burg­er recipe, which com­min­gles India rel­ish, capers, Beau Monde sea­son­ing, Mei Yen Pow­der with gar­lic, green onions, egg, and red or white wine.

Despite such unusu­al top­pings, a burg­er is still a burger—for mil­lions of peo­ple the most com­fort­ing food they can imag­ine. Crack­ing open Sal­vador Dali’s 1973 cook­book reveals few dish­es that are famil­iar, or actu­al­ly edi­ble or even legal. Dali formed ambi­tions to become a chef, he claimed, at the age of 6. Maybe that’s also when he came up with “Tof­fee with Pine Cones,” “Veal Cut­lets Stuffed with Snails,” and “Thou­sand Year Old Eggs.”

None of these recipes have in mind the needs of the carb-con­scious, or of veg­e­tar­i­ans and veg­ans. But some cre­ative reimag­in­ing could make them suit­able for sev­er­al kinds of mod­ern diets. (In Hemingway’s case, a sim­ple swap for any burg­er alter­na­tive might do the trick.) When it comes to cock­tail recipes, alter­na­tives are trick­i­er.

If you don’t drink alco­hol or eat meat, you’ll have lit­tle to gain from Leonard Cohen’s recipe for The Red Nee­dle, which involves two ounces of tequi­la and should be served with Mon­tre­al smoked meat sand­wich­es. Like­wise, I doubt there’s any veg­an, low-sug­ar, non-alco­holic way to make Eudo­ra Welty’s “Mother’s Eggnog” (which she also attrib­uted to Charles Dick­ens).

Maybe celebri­ty cook­books these days don’t con­tribute so much to the epi­dem­ic of heart dis­ease and hyper­ten­sion. But there’s some­thing to be said for the authen­tic­i­ty of recipes from famous peo­ple of the past. They reflect dish­es and drinks made with deep affection—for but­ter, cheese, carbs, salt, fat, and booze.

If it’s health­i­er fare you’re look­ing for, why not take a chance on Allen Ginsberg’s cold sum­mer borscht? Or David Lynch’s easy quinoa recipe? Aleis­ter Crowley’s recipe for a rice meant to be eat­en with cur­ry sounds delight­ful, though one can’t help but won­der at anoth­er lost recipe the infa­mous occultist once made for his fel­low moun­taineers on an expedition—a rice so spicy, he claimed, it made them “dash out of the tent after one mouth­ful and wal­low in the snow, snap­ping at it like mad dogs.”

See many more recipes from famous artists at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dessert Recipes of Icon­ic Thinkers: Emi­ly Dickinson’s Coconut Cake, George Orwell’s Christ­mas Pud­ding, Alice B. Tok­las’ Hashish Fudge & More

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

Pablo Picasso’s Two Favorite Recipes: Eel Stew & Omelette Tor­tilla Niçoise

Ernest Hemingway’s Sum­mer Camp­ing Recipes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness