In a time when many of us are turning to online recipes for instruction, how is it that heavy, richly illustrated cookbooks (unwieldy for practical use in the kitchen) are being released in a steady stream? Are cookbooks becoming more of an art piece than an instructional book? Are they resting on the coffee table more than on the kitchen counter?
Pictures and illustrations in cookbooks provide both an aesthetic and functional element in the narrative. Visuals of dishes and table settings reveal the context of the recipe, indicating how and with what to prepare and serve the dish.
Studying the history of French cookbooks, historians Philip and Mary Hyman find that as dessert courses became more spectacular during the 17th century, illustrations in cookbooks likewise became more elaborate. “Nouvelle Instruction pour les Confitures, les liqueurs, et les fruits,” a 1692 cookbook on preserves, was the first recipe book to include illustrations of fully set tables. Images serve to visually articulate the function of text, displaying a step-by-step cooking process, supplementing or replacing text. Images of the finished dish provide visual and evaluative aids to the recipe reader, who is able to determine in a glance the projected goal of the text.
Visuals also help to extend the practical level of cookbooks to the sensual level of food. Food studies and cross-disciplinary journals, such as Gastronomica, combine creative reflections on the aesthetic qualities of food with discussions on the political, economic and social dimensions of food production and consumption.
Similarly, cookbooks offer vicarious pleasure with imagined food consumption for the reader who virtually tastes and smells the food described in the recipes. The reader is also willing to defer eating what is prepared, invoking the concept of gastroporn or food porn, the imaginary or unattainable gratification of food. Cookbooks offer an escape and fantasy for readers with vivid images, while also grounding the recipe in reality with actual photos of the dish.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 11/13/2014]
