To procure a new copy, you have to mail in the old-fashioned way: to an address printed on the title page. This is the paradox of Down Home Cookin’: to obtain a copy of Down Home Cookin’, one must already have a copy of Down Home Cookin’. If one turns to the internet for permanence and reproduction,as we are apt to do these days, little can be found. Searching now reveals a few used editions floating around on eBay and one on Amazon. Unsurprisingly, the Amazon copy is marked with notes and stains. The seller writes: “pencil writing inside front cover, black marker writing on upper corner front cover written ‘(pie crust p.367’), diagonal crease on bottom back cover, and a couple of yellowed (grease?) stains on bottom of a few pages.”
If these books are not scanned, digitized, and archived, we lose not only the text of color correction Home Cookin’, but also the contributed labor and knowledge of the women who owned them. Clearly, the owner of the Amazon iteration was fond of the pie crust on page 367. In another version for sale on eBay, the owner inscribed the cookbook with “C Cake” and “Caret Cake” in two locations, presumably as a reminder that this particular cookbook had her favorite carrot cake recipe.
Digitizing and archiving cookbooks challenges the assumption that a scanned book is nothing more than a poor replacement for an official ebook, something easily bought and immediately downloaded, read on a Kindle or an iPad. Scanning and archiving cookbooks documents not only their content, but also the hands that they have passed through; each copy has its own unique revisions and adjustments. Take, for instance, the annotations in the Internet Archive’s scan of A Selection of Tested Recipes, a community cookbook from Howe, Indiana. Not only does the scan capture handwritten addendums to recipes, but also pages in which the owner has added her own recipes. In an unused copy of this cookbook, these pages would otherwise be left blank. But the process of scanning and archiving these previously owned objects quite literally allows us to see the hand of the homemaker at work.
That history is not visible for the cookbook’s digital analog: the recipe blog, perhaps the most ubiquitous means of publishing and accessing recipes today. Blogs offer little in terms of permanency and even less in terms of making the labor of recipe development visible. Though many of us have been raised on the popular phrase, “the internet is forever,” recipe blogs frequently disappear from the internet. Their content is perhaps even more precarious than that of the physical cookbook, no matter how obscure. Even more troublesome: edits, revisions, addendums and the work of recipe formation are not made evident in the form of the recipe blog. Edits become invisible, embedded in the revision history of the backend of a WordPress document rather than made visible to the naked eye.