Literary Forensics as Method: Chemical Analysis, Food Stains, and Readerly Encounters with Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks

Abstract Much of the study of cookbooks relies on guesswork and reading between the lines that are written down—the type of guesswork that requires cookbooks be read alongside other types of texts rather than standing on their own. This article presents a novel method for analyzing and reading food stains in historical manuscripts using infrared spectroscopy, a technique commonly used in analytical chemistry and forensic science, in combination with literary criticism. By taking cookbooks as an example, the author argues that food stains are important indicators of readerly interactions with cookbooks, particularly given the low levels of writing literacy that nineteenth-century cooks often had, and figures reading as an active process that is often accompanied by other tasks or acts, such as cooking. By using chemical analysis to identify stains and applying this critical specificity to methods proposed by such scholars as Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison, we can imagine what these often-accidental remains imply about the owner of the cookbook and how they may have understood their relationship to literature and books. This method uncovers and helps narrativize the act of cooking as it happened, not simply the recipe written before or the notes recorded after.