Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ISTANBUL UNIVERSITESI SOSYOLOJI DERGISI-ISTANBUL UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, cilt.40, sa.1, ss.365-396, 2020 (ESCI)
Books, photographs, manuscripts, legal documents, public records, letters, memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies are the primary resources used for examining and understanding the past. Apart from these, is it possible to understand the past through kitchens and what sorts of pots were used, the methods for preparing side dishes, the best way to fry potatoes, the manners about eating rice or the broad bean with meat, the proper way to prepare cranberry jam? And how can a cookbook that gives details about all of these things help a researcher? Thinking about the answers to these questions leads one to leave the grand narratives and classical resources to take a look at the kitchen as a part of everyday life, a mundane, unimportant space removed from ideology. Kitchens provide the opportunity to examine kitchenware, food, agriculture policies, food cultures, production and consumption, gender relations, and the changes in all of these. In such a context, cookbooks are understood as resources that document all of this throughout time and provide a basis through which to examine a past period. Driven by the above questions analyzed through Leman Cilizoglu's (1971) cookbook Yemek Pisirme Temel Metod ve Uygulama Beslenme Yemek Gorgu Kurallari [The Fundamental Methods and Application of Food and Cooking: Nutrition, Food, Rules of Good Manners], this descriptive paper is structured over understanding and discussing what cookbooks can say by analyzing the book's content, the structure of the recipes, the kitchen as a space for cooking and food, and the content of kitchens.