'Tried and Tested’: community cookbooks in Australia, 1890-1980

Australian community cookbooks are an under-recognised and under-utilised trove of historical information about the life of the nation. Special features of form and function make this cookery genre distinctively revealing not only of the evolution of Australian food culture, but of twentieth-century discourses of identity. Community cookbooks express the voices of "ordinary people" in everyday life, in particular the large cohort of mostly middle-class twentieth-century women who recognised the community cookbook as a way they could help themselves and their communities. In doing so, they made their social, religious, political and cultural values manifest in the fabric of the community and thereby contributed to the building of the Australian civil society. They also left an enduring record of the foodways practiced in Australian homes. This thesis undertakes a genre study of the Australian community cookbook. Investigation of the history of community cookbooks in Australia positions them in the context of a fast-changing social and political culture, within an emergent and maturing nation. Careful dissection of the community cookbook demonstrates the significance of the special features that distinguish this genre – the important principle of the volunteer community group and the role of the recipes. The thesis discusses how Australian community cookbooks relate to the three pillars of cultural history – class, gender and ethnicity. It further reflects on a trio of themes with particular resonances in Australian social history – technology, regionalism and the development of the Australian national and civic culture. Survey of a large number of texts helps to refine understanding of how the genre has been mobilised in Australia, and how it has contributed to the broad history of Australian communities and community endeavours. Closer reading of selected texts allows a deeper investigation of the themes of the community cookbook and produces a rich picture of Australian social and culinary culture at the domestic level. Sharing food is the most basic human communal activity. The sharing of recipes through community cookbooks has evolved as a multifaceted way of building social capital, making it a small but sturdy plank in the civil society. Community cookbooks are very flexible in reflecting individual communities, their foodways, their needs and their views of the broader society. This study of community cookbooks is a contribution to the field of Australian social and cultural history, particularly food history, and to the pursuit of history “from the ground up”.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 201