Underpinning most anthropological definitions of culture is the concept of the cultural transmission and diffusion of learned behaviour. Anthropological works generally emphasise the outcomes of this transmission rather than the processes, in part because the mechanisms are either ongoing or practically invisible. Recipes have proved a unique tool for tracking cultural transmission because of their inherent precision and characteristically datable contexts. This study uses recipes to explore the many paths of transmission and diffusion of culinary knowledge. The period under review is from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and the focus is on British culinary traditions up-to and after, their transfer to New Zealand. It was found that culinary knowledge was disseminated around New Zealand through both formal and informal mechanisms. Formal transmission involved teachers, their school cookery classes and published teaching manuals, all of which played a major role in training school children to cook the dishes served at family meals. In contrast, informal publications such as cookery columns in magazines and newspapers were transmitting recipes for more fashionable dishes, especially baking, and these incorporated mechanisms that promoted innovation more than retention of traditional recipes. The significant role of material culture in cookery provided another pathway of transmission through appliance recipe books which translated established recipes into a form that could be made with the new technology, thereby preventing their disappearance from the culinary repertoires of cooks. It was established that community cookbooks, a common means of fund-raising, were a significant means of diffusing culinary information. The cookbooks produced by such efforts demonstrated change over time in their recipe content, especially if published as a series and such publications were tangible repositories of the cookery knowledge within the community. This study examined not only the pathways of culinary transmission but also the contexts in which it occurred. These circumstances were found to be influential in determining eventual acceptance or rejection of cookery knowledge and recipes, and provide valuable insights into processes of culture change.

Community cookbooks operate through a rhetoric of place as ways of thinking about belonging and influencing communal identities. They reveal much about a community, including the sharing of memories and tradition, geographical identification, and representation of socio-cultural hierarchies and habits. For that reason, this paper advances the claim that the discourse and visuality in community cookbooks, specifically the cookbooks 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, and Charleston Receipts Repeats published during the height of a renaissance in Southern literature, influenced the identity of “Southerness” which, taken in conjunction with place, space, and time has resulted in a unification of the changing American South. Using Carolyn Miller’s notions of genre criticism on the basis of genres as social movements, community cookbooks qualify for the genre label of domestic literature in terms of content and rhetorical influence. To prove my claim, the use of images, recipes, and folklore within the pages are analyzed with five a posteriori themes that discuss relations between a sense of place and its foodways. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Industrialization and rapid urbanization characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in many aspects of domestic life. Scholars have used community cookbooks to document changes in domestic roles at the turn of the twentieth century. This study uses community cookbooks to look beyond domestic roles and to trace changing foodways during the period from 1870 to 1930 in the northern Central Valley of California. Nine cookbooks from Sacramento, California and five cookbooks from Stockton, California reveal changes in foodways during this time. Recipes, text, and advertisements in these cookbooks show changes in the manner of home food production; a loss of pre-industrial food knowledge; increasing standardization in recipes and cooking knowledge; and an increasing reliance on commercially processed and name brand foods. These changes indicate a growing population and shifting demographics. The results provide insight into differences between urban and rural foodways as urban populations grow. The intrusion of industrialized food into rural home cooking may provide a backdrop for contemporary understanding of urban foodways. Researchers seeking to understand how commercial foods become entrenched in modern foodways can use community cookbooks to trace back the introduction and assimilation of commercially processed foods in the past. Rewinding the process may provide insights into a variety of issues related to processed food. In addition, this study presents a method for using community cookbooks as historical documents to trace food and foodways over time including the unique role of advertising in this context.