Receipts
I saw a new word last year that has stuck in my mind ever since, along with my competing emotions of jealousy (wish I’d thought of that!) and gratitude (thanks for thinking of that!).
A professor in Sweden was describing how the internet is viewed by most people as “a space without time.” But he considered all of us to be “archeopolitans,” citizens of a vast and intergenerational digital archive.
I love the word!
When I think about being a citizen of an archive, though, my mind goes to food. Meals are an archive of ingredients and flavors that have shaped humanity, an archive that we consume to power our most basic biological processes, an archive we live in every day.
A current project has me immersed in the less-edible textual traces of this archive. Cookbooks and recipes—historically called receipts—have been my guides.
I even created a new section in my resources list to share these amazing materials, whether you use them for the kitchen or the craft table.
Mostly I’m working with academic collections, but plenty of other interesting sources exist. Vintage cookbooks on Reddit. Historical recipes from Bon Appétit magazine, Patreon, and Reddit (again).
Three fun examples:
Public Service Radio Cooking School cookbook from the 1920s, assembled by a radio station
[a TBD poetry cookbook]; I’m intrigued, but until it publishes, try one of my favs: The Hungry Ear
Food poetry is fantastic, too, from 2 a.m. cookies to souls weighed in bundles of wheat. The only question is which cookbook you might read by the light of the dinner fire.
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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.