What are not included in this list are manuscript cookbooks. Many of the great convents in Mexico still have magnificent manuscript cookbooks from the eighteenth century.  These are not only writen in a beautiful hand but really are part of the treasure of Mexico because it was in the convents that much of the country’s cuisine was created.

I happen to know for a fact that one of the most important “vanished” within the last couple of years. For a variety of reasons, the fact of its loss was suppressed. It may be well taken care of in the collection of whoever it was that purchased it.  He or she obviously can not make it available to others though.  So it’s effectively gone.  Unless perhaps some day some one returns it to the convent or to the national archive.

If you travel to Mexico, and if you are interested in its stupendous heritage of colonial architecture, you might look at the books available on the Espadana web site.

These are not just any old cooking classes, mind you. She offers cooking classes for young society ladies who are about to marry, together with the women who will be their cooks.

Together the mistress and the cook learn the classics of the Mexican kitchen and the international kitchen.  Together they will be able to provide the finest of Mexican cooking and in international, that is largely French, cooking.  This is essential because the bridegroom will be a senior lawyer, politician, businessman or diplomat.

What the course costs, I don’t know. I do know that the spiral-bound recipes book goes for $200, US dollars that is, not Mexican pesos.

In the past in Europe and the United States, and still today in many parts of the world, anyone who can afford to do so hires a cook.

We’re not talking modern America and personal chefs trained in a professional culinary school. We’re not talking royalty or the super rich who have always had male chefs trained by apprenticeship. Queen Elizabeth never had to take cooking classes with her servants.

Upper middle class and upper class housewives did have to, along with the servant who was to cook.

The young lady about to start on her housewifely career had not learned to cook at her mother’s knee.  She had not had to lift a finger to do household chores because they were done by servants. She might know a good bit about fine food because she had eaten at her parents’ table.  Or perhaps not, because she ate in the nursery or boarding school. In either case, she could not cook.

Hence the cooking classes. In the 1950s in England young ladies went to finishing school in Switzerland before they “came out” into society. They were taught the survival skills they would need such as how to swoop gracefully down a staircase in a long dress and do a deep curtsy without falling on their faces.

They also learned how to make gelatin from pigs’ feet. In my innocence, I thought this hopelessly impractical because who, fifty years after the introduction of packet gelatin, was going to go through the mess of boiling pigs’ feet and clarifying the gelatin?

Not these young ladies, of course.  That was a job for their cooks so that they could offer a variety of dishes in aspic. That, at least,  was the expectation. I suspect it was swiftly dashed as empire melted away.

Such schools, though, I think were pretty common in many parts of the world in the first half of the twentieth century, often run by poverty-stricken single ladies from the appropriate class background.

The bride-to-be learned three things, I believe.

First, how to manage a kitchen, how to put on a dinner party without breaking the bank, how to supervise the servants, how to manage the supplies, how to preserve foodstuffs from the estate, how to check the silver and china to see if any had been robbed, how to oversee the pantry and the shopping. Those supposed ladies of leisure I suspect worked harder than we can imagine.

Second, the basics of the recipes so that she could supervise the cook. She had to know the complex terminology of French cooking (wherever she was more or less as French cooking swept the world), know the traditional high class recipes of the region, have a sense of how to season and make final adjustments to the recipes. It was the housewife’s duty, in general, to plan the menu, to explain any novel dishes to the cook, to go into the kitchen and put the final touches to the dishes.

Third, how to cook sweet dishes: confections, sweets, and desserts, skills that were appropriate to her station and that demanded great skill and exact measurements.

I find it hard to read many of the great cookbooks of the nineteenth century without this perspective. Just take a look at the marvelous work by Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives, first published in Russia in 1861 and wonderfully translated (at least much of it) and edited and introduced by pioneering food historian, Joyce Toomre.

In essence, it’s a more formal version of that $200 book that the young ladies of Guadalajara purchase.

Julia Child’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine, her kitchen is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, and she is widely credited with having brought American food out of the dark ages of cans and tv dinners and into the light of gastronomy.

Yet I would bet that the number of American housewives who in the 1960s or subsequently who actually prepared lobster thermidor or ham braised in cream and mushroom sauce or beef filet stuffed with truffles and foie gras was a vanishingly small proportion of the total.

And the reason (apart from the expense of such dishes which are obviously for special occasions) is that the cuisine bourgeoise that Julia Child fell in love with was not middle class cuisine American-style but a cuisine for the tiny proportion of French who shortly after World War II still had cooks.

Julia Child never actually said this outright in her book. But if you read her memoir, My Life in France (2006) written with Alex Prud’homme, little hints pop up all over.

The book she worked on with Simca and Louisette (the germ of Mastering) consisted of recipes from Simca’s “own experiments, her mother’s notebooks, her family’s cook, restaurant chefs, and the Gourmettes” (the exclusive women’s eating club, mainly wives of the premier men’s eating club, limited to a hundred members).

When the three of them started a cooking school for Americans in Paris she “brought an American practicality to such questions as how to shop, cook, and clean without a staff (something that Simca and Louisette did not have a grasp of at all).”

They included a “peasant dish” cassoulet only at the insistence of their editor, the half dozen they already had being quite sufficient.

In short, Mastering describes the cooking of wealthy households who had highly-paid cooks.

If I think back to my time in Paris in the late fifties and early sixties when Julia Child was living there, when I shuttled between a top drawer diplomatic family and a solidly middle class family, the food I had, although good, was very simple: vegetable soups, small pieces of meat with no or very simple sauces, boiled potatoes, salads, fruit, occasionally a bought pastry for a special occasion.

In short, Julia Child was explaining in exquisite detail how Americans without cooks could reproduce the food of the French with cooks. It was a supremely American, supremely democratic, supremely idealistic thing to do. Not surprisingly, though, once she started her television career and once she began her subsequent series of books, the recipes became much simpler and veered away from the cook’s and restaurant dishes of Mastering.

In fact, Mastering is more the rule than the exception. Most cookbooks written before 1900, and a surprising number written after 1900, were cookbooks written for people who had a staff, usually a staff that included one or more cooks.

The skewing of pre-1950 cookbooks to those with servants is something I think we need to keep in mind when we hear laments about the decline of kitchen skills and the failure of women to provide tasty home-cooked meals. High quality home cooking can be pulled off without a staff, no doubt about it.

It’s worth remembering how often the good home cooking that is held up as a model is one that is damn difficult to emulate without a kitchen staff.

Then in 1968, she embarked on a series of wonderful cookbooks (listed in the next post). Her French Charcuterie and Pork Cookery was the third cookbook I bought, after Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food and Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, all of them in the brilliant Penguin series edited by Jill Norman.

All this is by way of introduction to a lovely celebration that will take place in New York at the Astor Center on March 18th, on what would have been her 80th birthday. It’s organized by Amy Besa, a true dynamo, and author of Memories of Philippine Kitchens. It will weave together a tribute to Jane Grigson’s life with contributions from later cookbook authors who have won the prize that memorializes her, the Jane Grigson Prize for Distinguished Food Scholarship of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Amy was one of those winners.

So was I and I would have love to have participated but I will be far away in Buenos Aires. But Doug Duda, another dynamo and director of the center, videotaped some brief comments when I was there. He asked when I first knew of her work, what I learned from it, and how it is influencing my current work.

In short, what I said, as I mentioned above, that I was lucky enough to come upon her just as I was getting interested in food. That she, particularly in her wonderful Fruit Book, showed that writing about food was worthy of serious intellectual attention and careful scholarship, while at the same time being both lyrical and a repository of inspiring recipes. So much so, that I thought there was little left to do. Only when I arrived in Hawaii did I find a subject that seemed so untouched that it was worth venturing where others more talented had already made their mark. And that as regards my current work on the history of food on a global scale, I would like to use it to reinforce her message about food and cooking which, perhaps slightly misquoted, is “We already have plenty of masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness.”

(Thanks to my friend John Whiting for repeatedly pointing out that comment of hers).

As an aside, I’m going to use this next time my husband tells me that boiling an egg is child’s play. I don’t think so. You can’t see inside the damn thing to know what point it’s reached. I bet that’s what the purchasers of those 54 million eggs were worried about.

But back to Delia. She’s just published a new cookbook called How to Cheat at Cooking. It’s designed to help people get meals on the table quickly using preprepared ingredients. Another aside. It’s the perfect illustration of why cookbooks are always so country specific. Imagine trying to hunt down frozen mashed potatoes or canned minced lamb in Mexico or even in the United States.

But back to the main point once more. In the course of the publicity for the book, she took on two icons of the British culinary establishment: Jamie Oliver (also famous for a much-publicized and not-entirely-successful effort to make British school food healthy) and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, champion of all bits of the animal. They’d come out urging Brits not to buy battery chicken.

Oh go ahead, says Delia. I don’t do organic. If there’s nice reasonably-priced organic, fine. If not, fine too. And those broiler house chickens have made chicken available to millions who would not otherwise be able to afford such luxury.

Well, that, combined with Delia’s spirituality and her love of soccer, is quite enough to make many people see red. Just scan the negative reviews on Amazon.

Now, I’m not a fan of spirituality and have no interest in soccer, but without having seen the book, I’m inclined to think the positive reviewers are right that it’s full of useful ideas. I have a couple of her earlier books and like them a lot.

I also suspect that I, like many of her fans, find her non-preachy voice and concern that everyone eat well, is a welcome change from much food writing.

And I don’t just suspect, I’m pretty certain that she’s winning the numbers game at least.

http://www.vub.ac.be/FOST/fost_in_english/ is the website of the Social and Cultural Studies of Food group at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels.

And http://www.iehca.eu/home.htm is the site of the European Institute of History and Cultures of Alimentacion, to give a free translation.

Coming soon. That question of the earliest uses of cacao revisited. I have my doubts.