Culinary Historians | A Tale of Two Cities: Community Cookbooks and Urbanization in California at the Turn of the 20th Century
Cookbooks from the past are a fascinating chronicle of the change that takes place as a community grows and expands. Food and Nutrition Educator Kate Helfrich has studied charity, or “community”, cookbooks produced in the late 1800s in Stockton and Sacramento, northern California. She shows how their recipes and advertising chronicle changes in the types of food that were eaten, the nature of home food production, and the influence of industrialization as these cities grew from Gold Rush-era local stagecoach stops to large metropolitan centers.