Northeast Historical Archaeology Volume 42 Foodways on the Menu: Understanding the Lives of Households and Communities through the Article 8 Interpretation of Meals and Food-Related Practices 2013 Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England's Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks Anne Yentsch Follow this and additional works at: http://orb.binghamton.edu/neha Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Yentsch, Anne (2013) "Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England's Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks," Northeast Historical Archaeology: Vol. 42 42, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.22191/neha/vol42/iss1/8 Available at: http://orb.binghamton.edu/neha/vol42/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). It has been accepted for inclusion in Northeast Historical Archaeology by an authorized editor of The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Northeast Historical Archaeology/Vol. 42, 2013 111 Applying Concepts from Historical Archaeology to New England’s Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks Anne Yentsch This article describes a study of New England cookbooks as a data source for historical archaeologists. The database for this research consisted of single-authored, first-edition cookbooks written by New England women between 1800 and 1900, together with a small set of community cookbooks and newspaper advertisements. The study was based on the belief that recipes are equivalent to artifact assemblages and can be analyzed using the archaeological methods of seriation, presence/absence, and chaîne opératoire. The goal was to see whether change through time could be traced within a region, and why change occurred; whether it was an archetypal shift in food practice, modifications made by only a few families, change that revolved around elite consumption patterns, or transformations related to gender and other social forces unrelated to market price.