A taste of British cookbooks: The role of paratexts in 18th century cookbooks. An approach to the Grewe Collection at the University of Barcelona.

Abstract

In 1997, the University of Barcelona received through a donation the Rudolf Grewe’s multilingual gastronomy personal library. Currently, 103 editions and 131 copies of the Collection, printed between the 16th and the beginning of the 19th century, are kept at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Grewe Collection is at the disposal of students and academics at the University Library and allows access to many outstanding British cookbook titles from the 18th century. This dissertation aims to approach 18th century cookbooks to identify and describe the role that paratexts, which are the book elements that surround the main corpus of the book, played in 18th century British cookbooks to complement receipts. The study is carried out, on the one hand, through a contextualization of cookbooks’ contents and usage evolution since they appeared for the first time in England in the 14th century, and, on the other hand, through a practical analysis in which Grewe’s personal library editions have been classified according to their century, language, printing place and genre. Further analysis is carried out to identify and study the main paratexts observed in eight 18th century and two early 19th century British cookbooks of the Collection. These studied paratexts are title pages, dedicatory epistles, prefaces, advertisements, frontispieces, bills of fare, lists of seasonal ingredients, tables of contents and alphabetical indexes.