I don't know how to ask this question, but how useful is a cookbook from the 18th century (or even the early 20th century)? The ingredients are likely called something else, or may be unavailable.
> There are ways the historian can read between the lines of the recipes, so to speak to answer questions that are not directly related to cooking or material culture but may deal with gender roles, issues of class, ethnicity and race. Even topics such as politics, religion and world view are revealed in the commentary found in cookbooks and sometimes embedded in what appears to be a simple recipe. The most valuable of cookbooks and related culinary texts also reveal what we might call complete food ideologies...
> Nor should any of these caveats prevent the historian from cooking historic recipes today. There is something palpably direct to be gained from tasting food from the past, in much the same way as one can learn from hearing a symphony on period instruments or viewing an old painting in a museum. The esthetic values that inform flavor preferences of the past are indeed very different from our own. Some ingredients people enjoyed would today be considered abhorrent; some flavors and textures bizarre if not disgusting. But this should not deter the intrepid investigator... What one learns from such an exercise is a feeling for the embodied experience of physically carrying out certain culinary tasks and a direct apprehension of what the palates of our forebears might have experienced.
You'll recognize most of the ingredients well enough based on my reprint of the 1884 Boston Cooking School Cook Book. But a lot of meats are going to be different enough that you'd want to change the prep. And, to most modern tastes, the recipes are just not going to be very good. I still keep some of the cookbooks handed down from my mother (like old Gourmet cookbooks from the 1960s or so). And even those are just not that useful for how I cook today.
Lots of interesting 18th century cooking and other period skills.
Also, reading stuff that's just out there can help shake up your mind in interesting ways.
There are tons of possibilities.
[1] http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/arti...