A SHORT HISTORY OF GASTRONOMIC LITERATURE
A SHORT HISTORY OF GASTRONOMIC LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the history of Romanian gastronomic literature, namely the first century of Romanian cookbook writing. Cookery books and gastronomic texts are one of the most interesting text types, which can be fruitfully analyzed and approached from multiple perspectives: linguistics, cultural history, language history, terminology and history can contribute to exploit the multiple resources of such texts, which mirror not only the gastronomy of certain historical periods, but reflect the linguistic and social habits of a century or another. Recipes are not scientific texts, nevertheless they can be considered technical texts, as they contain the lexicon and terminology of cooking and gastronomy, one of the most ancient human activities. Romanian gastronomic literature is a topic approached by many researchers. Despite this fact, during a previous research we conducted upon the history of Hungarian gastronomic literature and the history of ”kürtőskalács”, we reached the conclusion that there is no comprehensive study upon the beginnings and history of Romanian cookbooks. That is why we attempt to fill this gap and offer a list of the most important cookbooks written and/or published in Romanian. We intend to cover the first century of this kind of literature, the period between 1841 and the 1940s.

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