Vigo County Historical Society

Cookbooks provide us with food for thought

Wives and mothers have heard the plaintive cry "What’s for dinner?" every day of their lives.

Families have their favorite meals, which they enjoy regularly. I once had a neighbor who served her family chili every Saturday for lunch, whether it was 90 degrees in the shade or 10 degrees below zero.

But sometimes you want to try something different. So, you go to your cookbook for ideas. A cookbook is a collection of recipes with information about the preparation and serving of food.

One of the first known cookbooks was written in the second century. It was called Deipnosophistai (The Learned Banquet). Written by Athenaeus, a Greek gourmet, it was a dialogue between two banqueteers who talked for days about food and recipes for such things as stuffed vine leaves and varieties of cheesecake.

Apicius, a Roman merchant during the reign of Tiberius, wrote a prized cookbook and was host of so many colossal banquets, he was driven to bankruptcy and suicide.

In China, the master chef at the Imperial Court of Kubla Khan wrote a cookbook titled "The Important Things About Eating and Drinking."

The first French cookbook contained recipes for such delicacies as frogs and snails. Alexis Soyer, wrote a cookbook on French cuisine called "Shilling Cooking For The People," which sold 100,000 copies.

The invention of the printing press made cookbooks more widely available, and the first was written in 1485 by an Italian named Bartolemi Scappi.

The first cookbook written by a woman was written in 1670 by Hannah Wooley.

The most popular cookbook in America was written in 1896 by Fannie Farmer of The Boston Cooking School.

The 20th century has seen a prodigious burst of interest in cooking and cookbooks. There are cookbooks written for special diets, different ethnic backgrounds and regional cooking.

Cookbooks have become a mainstay of the publishing world. The cookbooks displayed in the picture are part of a collection at the museum,. Some are included in the new exhibit, "Hoosier Homemaker."