A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries (California Studies in Food and Culture) by Henry Notaker

Author:Henry Notaker [Notaker, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780520294004
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

A QUESTION OF PRICE

The first printed books were so expensive that few people had the money to purchase them, but books gradually became more accessible. In the sixteenth century, a Bible cost more than the monthly salary of a worker. In 1711, however, the price corresponded to the average earnings for one and a half days. Most cookbooks cost less than a Bible, and there were rather few cookbooks before 1800 with expensive paper, illustrations, and binding. But cookbooks were still out of reach for the poorest classes of society for a long time. This was unfortunately also true for recipe collections intended for the most destitute social groups.

One such book was written by Jacques Dubois, a Parisian doctor, in 1546.46 He promised to give his readers “health rules for the poor, easy to follow,” and explained the nutritional value of different foodstuffs. He gave simple recipes for soups and porridges made with bread, onion, roots, vegetables, and offal. Yet this book, small and modest as it was, was probably not bought by the poor because they could not read and had no money. From 1500 to 1800, it is estimated that between one third and one tenth of the population in Europe lived below the poverty line. About half of the inhabitants in larger cities were poor or marginalized, but the majority of the poor lived in the countryside, simply because urban Europe was so limited. In 1500, less than 5 percent of the population lived in towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. We have reason to believe that Dubois’s book and other books like it were bought by charitable doctors, priests, and various civil servants or landowners who wanted to help the most marginalized groups.

Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, cheap books were distributed in France by peddlers, who traveled to most of the country. The books were labeled la bibliothèque bleue—the blue library—because they were bound with cheap blue paper. The genres on offer were popular stories, almanacs, and handbooks of various kinds, among them certain cookbooks. But even these books cost a day’s salary for a worker.47

Early in the nineteenth century, the preface of a Swedish collection of simple recipes read: “These recipes are not intended for the poor class, they will not have money to buy it and no interest or time to read it.”48 Many cookbook authors complained in their prefaces about how expensive some cookbooks were, and they emphasized their efforts to make their own books simple and keep the prices low.49 But the real poor still had little chance of acquiring such books. The publishers and authors were conscious of the difference in purchasing power and therefore tried to present books in different price categories. The cheapest of Alexis Soyer’s books cost six pence, which was about 2 percent of the price of his most expensive book.

But the price of cookbooks was only one part of the financial barrier; the other was the price of food. The most expensive books would generally also have the most expensive ingredients.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.