The recipe / cook book exists on many different levels: as lists of recipes; as historical document; as reflections on food; as distillation of lifestyle; as propaganda; as autobiography. Recipes are presented in numerous ways that reflect the diversity of approaches to typographic hierarchy: as simple lists of ingredients; as sets of instructions; as diagrams; as sequential photographs; as continuous text; as bullet-pointed lists of instructions; as numbered lists of instructions; as conversations. How this information is presented will be the primary focus of a visual audit that will unpick the various typographic means that hierarchy is created within the convention of the recipe (recipes generally consist of a list of ingredients, sometimes a list of equipment, a set of oven temperatures and cooking times, a set of instructions and a set of timings for preparation and cooking).
A second focus of the visual audit will be the graphic language of recipe / cook books: how the authorial voice is created and amplified through typography, photography and graphic design.
Cook books exist on many different socio-political levels: in the seventeenth century recipe or receipt books contained a sometimes queasy mix of culinary and medical recipes; they can be political – wartime cook books as issued by the Ministry of Food are a kind of propaganda, vegetarian cook books can be positioned within the wider sphere of alternative anti-establishment lifestyles that emerged in the 1960s; cook books can be instructional in the forms of kitchen bibles aimed largely at women setting up home; they can exist as historical documents, reflecting the changes in eating habits for example the interest in Mediterranean food that coincided with the rise of air travel; they can also be aspirational, reflecting an idealised lifestyle as presented through food.
Traditionally, most domestic cook books have been aimed at women, as it is women who have traditionally maintained the home; cook books reflect the contemporary shift in domestic arrangements where (some) men now share the cooking.
Some cook books are aimed at professional chefs but I intend to concentrate on books that are aimed at the home cook. There are many different categories of cook books that are aimed for the home or amateur cook: kitchen bibles are basic reference books that include all types of cooking and sometimes home management (Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course); some are linked to restaurants (The Moro Cookbook); others to professional chefs (Gordon Ramsay); some are linked to television or newspaper columns (Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater); ethnic or international cook books look at cooking from other cultures (The Silver Spoon and Madhur Jaffrey); other books look at single subjects - a specific ingredient, technique, or class of dishes (The River Cottage Fish Book); some are about food history (Marguerite Patten’s Century of British Cooking).
The history of recipe / cook books is rich and extensive. A historical survey of cook books will be useful for contextualising my findings. I will need to narrow my focus: I have a large selection of books from the past fifty years (some of them illustrated here) but I think it may be wiser to limit my visual audit to books produced within the last twenty years as they will reflect the surge of interest in both cooking and books about cooking. As well as my own collection of books I will be able to draw on the books owned by my friends and from fellow students at LCC. Libraries will be another source of research material.