On Cookbook Bibliography
One of my main goals with the Nigerian Food Bibliography is to create a reference source for scholarship. To this end, I’ve been researching and reading a variety of similarly-themed works and will note some references which I’ll return to in time.
One of the most helpful pieces has been Juneisy Hawkins’s 2023 newsletter post on Historical Foodways, Books About Cookbooks: A Bibliography. From it, I learned about Katherine Golden Bitting’s Gastronomic Bibliography written in 1939.
The first thing I did when I looked through the archive.org copy was search for Nigeria - 0 results, then Brazil - also 0 results. My next search was Africa and I was THRILLED to find 4 results including an entry for a book I recently acquired, and for which I’ve been looking for more information - A Practical Guide to Cookery in West Africa and the Tropics by Sister Adelaide M. Cockburn published in 1905.
Then I looked through the index, which is a good place to continue the search, and saw entries for Jamaica - more on that - but also was intrigued by the titles of some books - How to Cook, and the more surprising one simply Cook Book, and 2 words!, but also Noble Cook, Professed Cook, and Universal Cook! There’s more to look at slowly, and so I’m noting it here so I can come back to it.
Some observations and thoughts related to books from Black Geographies:
Inclusions
There are 2 records of Jamaican cookbooks, with an observation of how few cookery books there were published in the West Indies.
Absences, or Exclusions | related to Nigerian and West African publications
There is at least one book I would have expected to see here, published in 1908 - 1910, well before this bibliography was published in 1939 - Practical West African Cookery by Sylvia Leith-Ross and Genevieve Ruxton
Perhaps not as strange of an exclusion is the Kudeti book of Yoruba Cookery, first published in 1934. I would have expected to see it as it was part published under British colonialism.
In this bibliography, there are several books named “Practical….”. I wager that this was popular in a particular time period but haven’t any data as such to share :).
Thank you, Juneisy!
I hope to continue this Bibliography journey, and to bring you along.
