http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199729937-e-13 http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978

http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199729937-e-13 http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199... > There are ways the historian can read between the lines of the recipes, so to speak to answer questions that are not directly related to cooking or material culture but may deal with gender roles, issues of class, ethnicity and race. Even topics such as politics, religion and world view are revealed in the commentary found in cookbooks and sometimes embedded in what appears to be a simple recipe. The most valuable of cookbooks and related culinary texts also reveal what we might call complete food ideologies... > Nor should any of these caveats prevent the historian from cooking historic recipes today. There is something palpably direct to be gained from tasting food from the past, in much the same way as one can learn from hearing a symphony on period instruments or viewing an old painting in a museum. The esthetic values that inform flavor preferences of the past are indeed very different from our own. Some ingredients people enjoyed would today be considered abhorrent; some flavors and textures bizarre if not disgusting. But this should not deter the intrepid investigator... What one learns from such an exercise is a feeling for the embodied experience of physically carrying out certain culinary tasks and a direct apprehension of what the palates of our forebears might have experienced.