James Beard’s American Cookery was published by Little, Brown in 1972, and it is the book Beard considered his most important work — a comprehensive encyclopedia of American cooking that took nearly a decade to research and write. At over 800 pages and 1,500 recipes, it is simultaneously a cookbook, a food history, and a cultural argument.
Beard’s thesis is that American cooking is not merely a derivative of European traditions but a distinctive culinary culture shaped by the continent’s geography, its indigenous ingredients, its immigrant populations, and its particular social history. He traces recipes from colonial New England through the antebellum South, the frontier West, the immigrant neighborhoods of the great cities, and the regional traditions that survived industrialization — creating a map of American food that no previous writer had attempted.
The recipes are drawn from every region and every tradition: New England chowders and brown bread, Southern biscuits and cornbread, Southwestern chili and tamales, Pacific Northwest salmon preparations, Midwestern farm cooking, Creole and Cajun dishes, and the contributions of Italian, Jewish, German, Scandinavian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants. Beard tests every recipe (he was famous for the rigor of his testing) and adds the personal annotations that make his cookbooks so readable.
The book appeared at a crucial moment in American food culture — just as Alice Waters and the California cuisine movement were beginning to assert that American ingredients and American cooking could be world-class — and it provided the historical foundation for that assertion.
Collecting James Beard’s American Cookery
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$40
- Signed copies: $100–$400