What ever happened to the old days when cookbook writers were anthropologists? Um, there were old days when cookbook writers were anthropologists? Oh. Really? Well, what happened to them? I’ll tell you what: spiral binding.

Joan and her generation of food writers had an entire world to discover. The work of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Claudia Roden, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Diana Kennedy introduced Americans to the great cuisines of the world, as well as many great regional cuisines of the United States. All of these food writers employed what one might call an anthropological or descriptivist approach to food writing. They visited home cooks and chefs in their kitchens, beat the pavement, and found recipes in dusty archives. Such cookbook authors still exist (Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, for example) but today the shelves of your local bookstore are dominated by what one might call the prescriptivist approach to writing cookbooks.