Partially supported by an American Rescue Plan award.
The Anatomy of a Stain project focuses on utilizing digital methods and techniques from analytical chemistry in order to develop a workflow for identifying and studying food stains in nineteenth-century American cookbooks. Food stains were sampled from a small collection of nineteenth-century American cookbooks purchased from antique store, rare book dealers, and online auction sites in various states of disuse, disrepair, and damage. Their obvious signs of disregard from traditional institutional collections marked them as rich sites of investigative scholarship given their plentiful signs of use. Applying FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) spectroscopy, then, allows for the food stains to be identified at the chemical level, matching the molecules present in the stain to a set of reference molecules.
This project has two primary goals. Because of the temporary nature of food, food studies as a field is necessarily limited to the study of writing about food. The first, and most important, goal of this project is to develop a method for studying the food itself and in doing so, emphasizing the importance of treating cookbooks as both literary texts and material interfaces. The second goal of this project is to emphasize how well hard sciences, like analytical chemistry, work with literary studies when working with objects like cookbooks which have both literary and utility functions. In demonstrating this workflow, the project aims to broaden the horizons of digital humanities work to include the digital methods used in more investigative approaches like FTIR.
Future work from this project will involve further sampling of older cookbooks, including books printed on cotton-based paper rather than tree pulp paper. In the future, the project will also focus on building upon the reference spectra which were used to help identify the initial stains, allowing for more precision and focus.
Work from this project has been presented at the Emerging Scholars Symposium at the Center for Material Culture Studies. This work will also be presented at DH2024 in Washington DC and is currently under review at American Literature.
Principal Investigator
Avery Blankenship, Graduate Student, English
