Edible Witness: Cookbooks, Recipes, and the Social History of Women

Jo Coghlan and Sherrie Gavin

University of New England

Edited Collection for Vernon Press

 The Cultural Politics of Witnessing Book Series

Cookbooks and recipe collections are far more than practical guides to household cooking. They are rich cultural texts, material objects, and historical records that preserve the labour, creativity, aspirations, relationships, and constraints shaping women’s lives across time. Whether handwritten in family notebooks, compiled by churches and community groups, published for commercial audiences, or circulated through magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, recipes offer a powerful entry point into the social history of women.

This edited collection invites chapters that explore cookbooks and recipes as witnesses to women’s history. It begins from the premise that recipes do not simply document food practices. They record domestic labour, kinship, care, class formation, migration, religion, education, consumption, nationalism, race, colonialism, and everyday survival. They can reveal women’s agency, but also the social expectations and structural inequalities that have shaped domestic life. Cookbooks and recipes are therefore not marginal or trivial sources. They are vital archives of gendered experience.

The collection seeks to bring together scholars working across history, sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, food studies, feminist studies, anthropology, museum and archive studies, and related fields. We welcome chapters that examine cookbooks and recipes from any historical period and geographical location. Contributions may focus on manuscript recipe books, community cookbooks, domestic manuals, commercial cookbooks, celebrity cookbooks, migrant and diasporic recipe collections, religious recipe traditions, wartime cookery texts, children’s cookbooks, digital recipe cultures, and other related forms.

We are particularly interested in chapters that consider how cookbooks and recipes function as forms of testimony: as evidence of women’s work, emotion, memory, skill, identity, and social worlds. We also welcome work that addresses absences and silences in the archive, asking whose histories are preserved, whose are obscured, and how recipe cultures might be read critically against the grain.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cookbooks and recipes as archives of women’s domestic labour

• Handwritten recipe books, marginalia, annotations, and family memory

• Recipe reproduction in print cultures

• Community, charity, church, and fundraising cookbooks

• Recipes and the history of care, kinship, and intergenerational knowledge

• Women, food, and material culture

• Class, aspiration, and respectability in cookbook culture

• Race, colonialism, migration, and nation in recipe collections

• Recipes and women’s work during war, depression, austerity, or crisis

• Domestic education, household management, and gendered citizenship

• Regional, rural, and local women’s food histories

• Cookbooks, modernity, consumer culture, and the feminised home

• Women’s health, dieting, nutrition, and moral regulation in cookbook texts and magazines

• Religious women, faith communities, and culinary tradition

• Feminist approaches to recipe archives and domestic texts

• Digital recipe cultures and the changing forms of women’s culinary memory

• Archival, museum, and methodological approaches to cookbooks and recipes

Submission information

Please submit an abstract of 200 words and a brief biographical note of 100 words.

Timeline

Abstract submissions due: 15 May 2026 
Notification of acceptance: 1 June 2026
Full chapters due: 1 October 2026

Chapter length

Full chapters should be approximately 5000 words, including references.

Contact

Please send abstracts and enquiries to: Jo Coghlan (University of New England): jo.coghlan@une.edu.au