A First Peek at the Recipes

Some Recipes from the First Cookbooks Scanned

I have been diving into the image scans for the first set of cookbooks selected for this project, and I wanted to share some interesting finds. Even though the goal of “distant reading” is to analyze the full corpus for larger patterns, it is still important to get to know the texts in your corpus through close reading and develop an understanding of the context for the broader findings you may uncover. As each cookbook is scanned, I intend to look over each and keep a running list of interesting observations that I will use to shape the questions I ask and compare later to the results of the NLP analysis.

What stands out the most when you first start paging through these cookbooks are the head-scratchers, the ones that make you gasp at your desk and say “What in the world?”

As I looked through more and more books, however and not unexpectedly, I could see common recipes coming up again and again with different names and slightly different ingredients but very clearly a part of a shared food culture. If you’ve spent a good amount of time in the midwest or in Iowa specifically, you may be able to predict some of these common recipe families, and if you grew up here, some may unlock a food memory you haven’t thought of since childhood. What I know as “7-Layer Salad” but what is also referred to as “24-hr Salad” and “Layered Lettuce Salad” appears in book after book with very little variation: layers of lettuce, celery, green pepper, onion, and frozen peas (and sometimes additional vegetables or hard boiled eggs) frosted with a thick layer of mayonnaise (or Miracle Whip) and topped with shredded cheese and bacon, best served after spending a night in the fridge to marinate.

Other examples, while containing more variety in specific ingredients from recipe to recipe, as a whole are identifiable as a category by their shared preparation method and ingredient familes. “Luncheon Hamwiches,” “Pizza Burgers,” “Spamburgers,” “Hanky Panks,” are all open-faced sandwiches with ground meat, cheese, and sauces or seasonings spread on bread and baked or broiled.

With the popularity and proliferation of home gardens, Iowans also inevitably needed a variety of ways to deal with the late summer zucchini plague: