New Book!
- Making Dinner : How American Home Cooks Produce and Make Meaning Out of the Evening Meal With a vast selection of foods and thousands of recipes to choose from, how do home cooks in America decide what to cook - and what does their cooking mean to them? Answering this question, Making Dinner is an empirical study of home cooking in the United States. Drawing on a combination of research methods, which includes in-depth interviews with over 50 cooks and cooking journals documenting over 300 home-cooked dinners, Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert explore how American home cooks think and feel about themselves, food, and cooking. Their findings reveal distinct types of cook-the family-first cook, the traditional cook, and the keen cook -and demonstrate how personal identities, family relationships, ideologies of gender and parenthood, and structural constraints all influence what ends up on the plate. Rawlins and Livert reveal research that fills the data gap on practices of home cooking in everyday life. This is an important contribution to fields such as food studies, health and nutrition, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and American studies.
Related Guides
About the Culture and Cuisine of the United States and Canada
This is a guide to selected sources on the culture and cuisine of the United States and Canada
Blog Post, American Folklife Center (Library of Congress)
- Railbirds, Cranberries, and Eels: Foods of the New Jersey Pinelands The Pinelands Folklife Project Collection is the result of a three-year ethnographic study of the pine barrens of Southern New Jersey focusing on the interconnection of culture with the environment. There is a great deal to be found in this collection, including music, arts, and the many cultural groups in this region. For this blog I will focus on what seems to me to be the heart of the collection: hunting, gathering, growing, and preparing foods.
Featured Film
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window
Contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
Librarian
This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.