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Culinary History, Food and Drink, Posts, Summer 2026

What were we eating? Salmon, seafood, and the diet of fishing and canning communities in British Columbia’s Salmonopolis

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By Tatyana Beck, with content adapted from Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, a Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society publication

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fishing and salmon canning industries on the West Coast of British Columbia (BC) were powered by a diverse workforce of Indigenous communities, European settlers, and international labourers primarily hailing from Japan and China. This multicultural working community was in turn powered by salmon.

The communities that fished the Fraser River and laboured for the expanding number of canneries along the BC coast were operating in the province at a time when Pacific salmon was particularly abundant, fresh, and accessible. The canneries along the Coast, which opened as early as the 1870s, were built at the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had access  to a seemingly endless supply of fat, fully-grown salmon as the fish made their way from the ocean towards their freshwater spawning grounds each summer and autumn.

Chum salmon awaiting processing, Leonard Frank Photography. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G1996.006.002/8

Known colloquially as “Salmonopolis”, the village of Steveston, BC was a major player within the history of these industries. By 1890, Steveston was home to a total of 15 operating canneries,the largest of which was the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. For the communities living and working in Steveston, fish and seafood weren’t just a job – they were inseparable from the sights, smells, and taste of everyday life.

In Steveston, like the rest of the Coast, the first cannery workers came from the local Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups were the first fishers of the Fraser River, as well as the original knowledge-keepers who taught European settlers how to find and fish Pacific salmon. Traditional Indigenous fishing focused on collecting enough fish to feed community members during the spring and summer, and to be smoked, dried, or candied for winter preservation or seasonal trade. 

Fishers taking a lunch break on the dock. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2003.033.004.

The arrival of European businessmen to Steveston, alongside the newly-invented process of commercial canning, brought rapid change. The industry grew, and cannery work attracted labourers from around the world. Along the West Coast, the Japanese community had a significant presence and brought tremendous fishing expertise with them. Chinese labourers, some already in BC to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, supplied seasonal labour in a variety of manual positions. Together with a range of European immigrant communities and early Indigenous workers, these communities formed the workforce that helped the business of salmon canning and exporting flourish. The Fraser River’s abundant marine populations became an economic tool, exported by sea to buyers primarily in England.

But wait: if the hundreds of thousands of cans of salmon that the canneries produced were being sent across the world to England, then how was salmon the food that powered the Cannery’s workforce? What, exactly, were they eating?

Cannery can loft stacked with thousands of cans waiting to be filled with salmon. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2002.003.001.

In 20th century Steveston the reality was this: when the river has a seemingly never-ending supply, even the canneries might turn away your catch. Even after selling what the canneries rejected, leaving gifts for your friends and neighbours, and stocking your pantry with self-canned product for the winters, there would still be more fish waiting for you to use. If you were a fisher, docked for the night and in need of dinner, what would’ve been simpler than taking a fish right out of your boat to whip something up for you and your crew? With such abundance, Steveston residents would make use of whatever leftover fish they had on hand, adapting traditional recipes to fit with the resources the River had given them.

There was one notable exception: Indigenous communities, who had been the earliest workers at many West Coast canneries, were soon heavily policed and restricted from partaking in traditional fishing practices or accessing salmon for their communities in favour of those very same canneries.

At the canneries, seasonal workers typically lived in bunkhouses segregated by race and gender, or in communal housing with a contracted cook supplying meals. Supplies often included the national foods of the workers, such as salted eggs, bean cakes, and bamboo shoots for Chinese bunkhouses. This community would certainly have made use of fresh or canned local fish in addition to the pork and chicken they were supplied. 

Commercial fisherman Butch Sakiyama remembers bringing the fish he’d caught that the canneries had rejected to the bunkhouses to be turned into meals for himself and the other fishers : “[…] the ladies would cut it up, salt it or cook it, and the next day, next thing you know they got teriyaki salmon. And the ladies would go up there and grow their own veggies, […] and have meals ready for us”.

With diverse communities working and living in such close proximity, there were opportunities not only to adapt one’s own cultural recipes, but to learn and share recipes with one another. Commercial fisher and Coast Salish/Sahtu-Dené cultural worker Rosemary Georgeson recounts how she and her father shared jibu, a seafood hot pot, with Japanese-Canadian fishers they encountered one night after she gave them some of the fillets from her family’s boat. “[…] they bring me and dad over and they start making this sauce on the grill, adding in slivered onions and carrots, and then the slivered fish. We ate together and they spent about two hours talking with my dad.”

Cover, Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present

The Gorgeson’s story is just one of the many tales included in the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site’s Fish Tales feature exhibit (2023-2025), which explored coastal BC residents’ deep ties to fish and seafood as a dietary staple, source of community connection, and a way of life. The legacy project created from this exhibit, the newly-published Cannery community recipe book Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present collects the “fish tales” shared by Steveston’s present community members, fishing communities, and museum audiences and connects them to the past experiences, interviews, recipes, and eating traditions of Steveston’s past.

Credit: pp. 44-45; Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, Copyright 2025, Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.

This article is only a taste of what can be found in the Society’s new publication. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is now available at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site in Steveston, BC, or through our online gift shop at https://thecannerystore.square.site/s/shop. 

References: 

Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2026.

The Monster Cannery: The History of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2011.

Tatyana Beck is a heritage and cultural resource management professional and current Curatorial Program Manager at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. With over five years of experience in museum programming and interpretive writing and many more in cultural and event work, Tatyana finds joy in using storytelling to create connection and bring new and hidden perspectives to audiences of all ages. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is her first official publication.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society honours the importance of Canada’s West Coast fishing history by sharing stories of the fishing industry and fishing communities through exhibitions, collections, programs, and events. In addition to operating the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, the Society works to achieve its mission through other activities such as creating annual feature exhibitions related to fishing history and producing community events. www.gulfofgeorgiacannery.org 

 

Food and Drink, Posts, Spring 2026

On Being Influenced: Consuming, Producing, and Performing Recipes on Social Media

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By Mark Anthony Arceño

The rise of the Internet and digital media introduced food blogging as a new way of consuming food culture, with recipes available at the click of a button. At the click of another button, they could be saved or printed and filed away. It became easier and more affordable to compare recipes and engage with recipe creators. Chef reputation, star ratings, and responses in comment sections provided a different kind of authority than the more fleeting form of televised cooking shows or the rigidity of published, physical cookbooks.

My own journey into food blogging began after college, shortly after I started working at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Part of my compensation included housing in a residence hall, and I wanted to prove that it was possible to cook and bake with limited equipment and space, just like when I studied abroad in Paris. I began developing food and culture programming and created a blog to chronicle how and what I was “Learning through Food.”[i] The site served as a personal, public repository of memoir-style accounts of foodie experiences, including restaurant reviews and a space to test, collect, and share others’ recipes as I developed my own variations (e.g., dark chocolate salted caramel bacon brownies and ratatouille, both of which I continue to refine).

@learnthrufood and learning through macarons

Graduate school inevitably redirected my attention from blogging to classwork, papers, and doctoral research in Ohio and France. After graduate school and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I ventured back into virtual space and into the Instagram baking community. Instead of learning how to work with sourdough, I decided my niche would be finessing the finicky French macaron. I baked my first set of macarons — to be clear, not the French president or macaroons of the coconut kind — for St. Patrick’s Day. Every year since then, I have baked some variation of a shamrock-shaped macaron filled with mint chocolate, in honor of what I call my “macaroniversary.”

Fig. 1. In celebration of my fifth “macaroniversary,” I produced a shamrock-shaped macaron filled with a mint-chocolate ganache, with Rémy and Émile (characters from Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille) on my shoulders. The Reel I performed (click image to view) included ingredients and recipe instructions embedded in the Reel itself. This was cross-promoted with my secondary account @aventuresavecremy.

 

I initially started @learnthrufood to relaunch my “Learning through Food” persona and record my research and food adventures. With a commitment to learning through macarons (about them and myself in the process), Instagram became my chosen platform for journaling the good and the bad, learning from the successful shells and the “macawrongs” (macaron shells that did not bake properly for any variety of reasons). These early images symbolized processes of tinkering with recipes and photo quality, until I became more consistent in terms of both taste and aesthetic.[ii] Later, they became snapshots waiting for someone to discover them and hopefully Like, Comment, and ideally Follow.

And then, as Raisa Bruner reported in 2020, came the 15-second, short-form approach known as Reels, to counter TikTok videos. This was preceded by Shares, Stories, and Saves as potential pathways for extending reach. Like others, I initially resisted but eventually caved, suddenly entering the vlogging realm, where my early love for TV cooking shows merged with the printed cookbooks and recipes I collected over the years. With the support of fellow macaron bakers, we continue to navigate ways of being and developing content that matters — to ourselves, Followers, and unknown others.

As Kelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick (2025) argue, Instagram Reels have reshaped recipe narratives by making them multisensory and expanding culinary authority. Whether sharing recipes, plated dishes, or behind-the-scenes makings-of, creators turn content into performance. It is not “just” ingredients, hints, or steps being shared via text in the caption or scrolling through the video. Sound invites engagement through elements like ASMR (cracking eggs, pouring sugar, mixing ingredients), while seasonal or thematic music reinforces specific holidays or connections to popular culture. Lyrics or trending audio can perfectly sync to specific steps of a recipe or reflect a timely, collective emotion. What is more, voice recordings—such as my use of French despite having a largely English-speaking audience—demand considerations of pitch, cadence, or speed of speaking. Together, such decisions help create the final production.

Content length may also matter for the moving target of “maximum reach.” Indeed, there is an art to editing actual time in the kitchen into consumable, bite-sized content. Less frenetic is an approach of showing clips in real time, though viewers may have no interest in seeing me macaronage (incorporating almond flour and powdered sugar into whipped egg whites and granulated sugar) for 5 minutes or stare at macaron shells baking for 22 minutes. Options include not showing those steps, though they are still part of the recipe; speeding things up and showing processes in “Reel time” (e.g., a #MAClapse or my portmanteau for a macaron time lapse); or, in a similar way to “TV magic,” swapping bowls or cookware to show the end product. One way to do this in an Instagram context is to tap ingredients and cut to the result (e.g., egg whites to perfectly whipped meringue), though doing so masks or ignores both time and technique.

Lessons learned through working on and with recipes in digital space

Especially among those of us who spend any time collecting or creating digital content, I wonder if you share the following observations. 

Fig. 2. Highlights (the circles categorized above the Grid) and pinned Posts help draw attention to a range of previously posted content.

First, as much as Instagram archives content, how accessible is it as it gets buried by subsequent posts? Linked Reels, Highlights, and Collections are certainly helpful tools to curate a personal or even collective recipe archive, since hashtags are becoming more irrelevant with advancements in AI. The Linked Reels feature allows content creators to link individual Reels over time (e.g., a series of steps in a recipe), while a Highlight contains a collection of up to 100 related, previously shared Stories. If a User deems a recipe is worth saving—even if they do not end up returning to it, as in my case with tabbed cookbook pages or DVR’ed cooking shows—they can Save content to a Collection (e.g., “Recipes to try”), download it if possible, or write down ingredients and steps. It is possible to even limit shared content to a Close Friends list, or to add other accounts to a single Collection so that recipes are shared among select members. In these ways, recipes live in a liminal space as ephemeral objects that materialize once consumed or archived outside of the platform.

Second, given time and effort in producing content, how “instant” is Instagram? Existing in a communal, “third place” (see Elyse Bouvier’s 2018 chapter) are not only shared recipes but also, in the best of cases, communication, collaboration, and community-building that are anything but instant. Here, emphasis is placed on growth through constant and consistent sharing over shared interests, including (in my case) macarons; baking and cooking more generally; restaurants, wineries, or brands to support; wine as something to cook, drink, and research; and even the “rats” I now bake with. Concurrently, a reframing may be needed for what “instant” means. Maybe Instagram is not a permanent repository, but rather a representation of the current recette du jour (or however long it takes before the next viral recipe comes along). Due to the inherent difficulties of accessing past content, unsaved recipes essentially dissipate, as they are replaced by the next Post or Reel seeking attention on the Instagram Feed. What is saved, however, captures something (a food, event, or trend) considered important in that space of time.

Third, what is the “it” that we as content creators are creating? Is it still about (re)creating recipes and sharing results or about creating a performance for Followers, others, or ourselves to consume and engage with? Reflecting on my multimodal relationships with food media, I see that I have not only collected and developed recipes to prepare and share,but also ways (read: performances) of sharing food knowledge. New media tools and trends become new ingredients to work with and, for better or worse, adapt to. With this in mind, and in my ongoing quest to understand the Algorithm, I have come to realize that I am looking for a kind of Holy Grail: *the* recipe for the right ingredients and techniques for baking up not just a successful macaron, but a successful Reel as well.

Out with the new, in with the old? Potential futures and lives of digital recipes and recipe collections

Since I began my macaron journey, repeated platform crashes have made me question my ongoing use of Instagram to archive my food content. Widespread outages, locking users out of their accounts, occurred in March and December of 2024 across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Similar disruptions followed in March and August of 2025, impacting features like Reels, Chats, and Stories. An Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) outage in October further exposed the risks of widespread reliance on a single system, while alleged AI-caused AWS outages earlier this year bring into question the use of artificial intelligence for the sake of efficiency.

Research reflects similar concerns. In their analysis of #facebookdown during the October 2021 outage, Mengqi Liao and S. Shyam Sundar (2022) found that, beyond complaints and mockery of the situation, users identified a need to detox from social media. Meanwhile, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel (2021) emphasized both the social and economic reliance on social media, particularly for small businesses. Although not all users rely on social media for income, many professional and home bakers use Instagram and other platforms to promote and sustain their business.

I now consider outages as inevitable and worry about losing my work, which is why I have started downloading each posted Reel. This has also made me realize that recipe creation and sharing depend not only on producers and consumers, but on third-party systems: servers, platforms, and websites that host and mediate content.

So, what happens if I cannot access Instagram? Without logging in, I cannot post; during outages, I lose access to saved recipes. These risks are not so different from corrupted files or even physical losses like a handwritten recipe or cookbook destroyed in a fire or flood. Perhaps recipes should be stored across multiple platforms, with multimodal content requiring multisaving modes. But this raises another issue: should I also preserve the raw data? My phone, which I use to record and edit Reels, is already strained by storage limits, as videos take up far more space than photos.

I end this growing cacophony of questions by returning to the idea of the instant. Before written recipes, knowledge was passed down through oral tradition, and perhaps oral collective memory will be what truly “saves” recipes if physical and digital archives disappear. Much like reconstructing an endangered language, the more viral a Post or Reel becomes in a given instant, the more people could contribute to the reconstruction of the “lost” recipe.

But even more importantly, what I think remains is the legacy of the content creator and community who produced, consumed, and potentially reproduced the corpus of recipes performed for other people. And it is especially clear in this way that recipes as media are incredibly social and take on a life of their own.

 

[i] For me, the concept of “learning through food” includes learning about people and cultures through the foods they prepare and consume; the recipes which have been passed down, shared and adapted over time; and the meaning behind the meal.

[ii] See, for example, these linked Instagram Reels featuring my dark chocolate salted caramel bacon brownies in macaron form and my more recent takes on ratatouille and confit byaldi.

Mark Anthony Arceño received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from The Ohio State University, having completed comparative winegrowing research in central Ohio and Alsace, France. He is currently the Senior Academic Program Coordinator in OSU’s Department of Comparative Studies, where, in addition to the Department of French and Italian, he also teaches courses on food culture and sustainability. Outside of his social media work on Instagram @learnthrufood and @aventuresavecremy, and Facebook @Learning through Food and @Learning through Wine, he serves as the Chapter Leader of Slow Food Columbus.

18th Century, Food and Drink, Posts, Series: Japanese Studies, Spring 2026

The “Silent Summary of Cooking” in Feudal Japan

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By Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto

In eighteenth-century feudal Japan, some of the most impressive culinary work was also the least visible. Court chefs prepared elaborate banquets for lords and shoguns, yet their names appear only in private records. Their expertise lived not in bustling restaurants or published books but in personal notes, oral instruction, and years of accumulated practice. The story of Funaki Den’nai (1685–1759) offers a rare window into that hidden world of personal recipes and the extensive research it entails.

Den’nai was the head chef of the Kaga Domain, a wealthy regional court on the Sea of Japan governed by the powerful Maeda clan. He came from modest origins, the son of a handyman in a vassal household, with only three years of cooking experience as a commis, appointed official cook at just twenty-two, apparently through direct recognition of his talent. He was recruited after an unsuccessful call for skilled chefs, the strict selection process having weeded out all other candidates. The importance the Maeda placed on their head chef stemmed from the clan using cooking as a tool to win over the central government, and from their lords having a special personal interest in the culinary arts and local food culture. The Maeda supported Dennai’s career over the following decades, working between the domains of Kanazawa Castle in Kaga and the Edo villa (modern Tokyo). He rose to become the principal administrator of the Maeda kitchens, a position prestigious enough to earn him a samurai title, making him one of the domain’s celebrated hōchō samurai, or “knife samurai.”

Fig. 1. Asano River in Kaga, near Kanazawa Castle. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What made Den’nai exceptional was not just his cooking but his compulsion to write everything down. He began keeping personal notebooks at thirty-four with a treatise on banquet cuisine and continued for the rest of his life: food taboos, medical combinations, Japanese and foreign recipes, current affairs, and opinions on the declining state of Japanese cooking. His masterwork was the nine-volume Ryōri Mugonshō (Silent Summary of Cooking), begun in 1727 and completed after his death by his son Yasunobu. It is the most comprehensive culinary encyclopedia of the Edo period (1600-1868).

The Silence of Ryōri Mugonshō meant that it was never meant for the public eye. It was a working document, a private archive compiled for the chefs who would succeed him, so that the knowledge that sustained Kaga’s reputation would live on. What Den’nai thought his successors needed to know about cooking went far beyond recipes. The work reads less like a cookbook and more like a natural history of food. Each entry on an ingredient records its regional names, sourcing locations, quality grades, preservation methods, seasonal variations, and medicinal uses. Sketches help identify easily confused plants and mushrooms. Historical notes trace an ingredient’s origins and regional food customs. That breadth reflects how Den’nai developed his expertise. He had three main sources: written texts (Chinese herbology, Japanese cookbooks, classical literature), informants (from farmers and fishermen to leading herbalists and doctors), and his own direct observation. The three years he spent as a chef in rural Kaga left traces throughout the encyclopedia: entries on acorns and horse chestnuts—foods too astringent and humble for any court menu— describe how mountain communities processed them, steeped and dried, then ground and mixed into rice cakes. Similar practices were recorded by ethnologists in remote Japanese villages in the early twentieth century, echoing the methods Den’nai had documented two hundred years earlier.

His attention to Kaga’s regional specialties is particularly remarkable, and in line with his lords’ gastro-political interests. He documents the famous winter sardines of Himi Bay in Kaga with the precision of someone who has sourced and cooked them. He notes with pride that Edo sardines are oilier and plainly inferior. Because Kaga’s fresh produce could not be easily brought elsewhere due to spoilage, Den’nai also records how his lords cultivated local plants at their Edo residence. For example, he talks about them growing a wild sweet-and-sour fruit vine called mube (Stauntonia hexaphylla), which was traditionally offered back in Kaga as tribute from a remote village on the Nōto peninsula. Food was crucial to regional diplomacy and to fending off nostalgia when away from home.

Fig. 2. Sardine Fishing Hut in Himi Bay, Etchu Province, Kaga Domain. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What the Ryōri Mugonshō preserves, in the end, is the full texture of how culinary knowledge moved in premodern Japan: through conversations with producers and merchants, through fieldwork and reading, through sourcing and experimentation. Den’nai’s personal collection was a working archive of messy and encyclopedic (yet professional) learning. Yet it only received public recognition 250 years after his death, when local historians unearthed and published some of his writings. Scholars today praise Ryōri Mugonshō for offering a nuanced, everyday view of premodern Japanese food, and Den’nai’s life even inspired the 2012 period drama Bushi no Kondate (A Samurai’s Menu). Ryōri Mugonshō is a reminder of how much knowledge can live in the unofficial record; that is what makes it feel genuinely alive.

 Sources and Recommended Literature

National Diet Library. “Ryōri Mugonshō [2].” Tokyo: National Diet Library Digital Collections, accessed December 21, 2025.

Nishimura, Shintarō. Kyūchū no Shefu, Tsuru o Sabaku: Edo Jidai no Chōtei to Hōchōdō. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012.

Osawa, Yoshimi. “Ethnobotanical Review of Traditional Use of Wild Food Plants in Japan.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 20, no. 1 (2024): 100.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. “Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan.” In Food History: Critical and Primary Sources: Global Contact and Early Industrialization, edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher and Eric C. Rath. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Rath, Eric C. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Tō, Tomoko, and Watanuki, Toyoaki. Hōchō-zamurai Funaki Dennai: Kaga Hyakumangoku no Okakae Ryōrinin. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013.

Watanuki, Toyoaki, ed. Kaga-han Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai Hensanchoshū. Toyama: Katsura Shobō, 2006.

Yoneda, Naofumi. Ryōri Mugonshō: Kaga-han Okakae Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai no Shokuzai Hyakka. Kanazawa: Noto Insatsu Shuppanbu, 2016.

Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto, a native of Zamora, Spain, is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyoto University. Miguel’s research focuses on the historical evolution of vanishing wild ingredients in Japanese cuisine from the Edo period to the present, as documented in recipes. He views cuisine as an expression of the relationship between humans and nature (ethnobiological knowledge), integrating historical and ethnological methodologies and emphasizing the reconstruction of the materiality of Japanese culinary culture. This approach aims not only to deepen our understanding of food history but also to revive lost culinary knowledge for use in contemporary cooking. As a former line cook and sous chef, Miguel puts that knowledge into practice through pop-up events.

Mail: mappfgh@gmail.com

Instagram: miguelap8 (personal)/ remapped.recipes (pop-ups)

 

 

American Studies, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

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By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,” Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.

KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.