"Foods of the World", as We Knew It Then

Why I'm spending 2026 with the Time-Life "Foods of the World" series

Hey everyone–yeah, I realize it’s been a minute, and I’m sorry for leaving you without a post for so long. I’ve been at my full-time job for 9 months now (not a topic for this platform) and it’s fantastic, creatively and professionally fulfilling and putting me right back in the food world I’ve loved for so long. It’s been so great that I even considered suspending this Substack indefinitely. But there’s a ticking clock that has brought me back, an itch that the food historian in me can’t help but scratch. So here we go again…

In December 2024, my mom gave me a fantastic gift: a complete set of the Time-Life cookbooks documenting the “Foods of the World,” straight from eBay to my enthusiastic hands. The series began in 1968 and was published through the late 1970s, comprising a total of 27 volumes, each accompanied by a spiral-bound recipe booklet. The masthead was drawn from what Nora Ephron called the “Food Establishment” at the peak of the “Good Food Movement.” Ephron called the series “a massive, high-budget venture that has managed to involve nearly everyone who is anyone in the food world,” and she wasn’t wrong. The series editor, Richard L. Williams, marshaled some of the most brilliant food folks of the age as writers and editors, including Nika Hazelton, Adrian Bailey, Pierre Franey, and Craig Claiborne (who worked with Franey on the volume on Classic French Cooking even after panning the inaugural volume on Provincial French cuisine, written by MFK Fisher.) James Beard and Michael Field (who died in 1971 before the series was complete) signed on as consulting editors, and the dozen-odd recipes that appeared in each volume were tested in a kitchen led by John Clancy, a protégé of Beard’s and one of the leading culinary instructors in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also one of the first cookbook series of its time that focused on regional cuisines, drawing a clear line between the cuisine and culture of a nation. (No wonder it sold more than 500,000 copies via Time-Life subscriptions before appearing in bookstores.) It appealed to Time-Life subscribers, but also to the armchair traveler, the restaurant-obsessed gourmand, and the adventurous home cook. It treated food as worth celebrating, and in the “Land of the Rising Soufflé” that was very big news.

But why did I want my own set of these books? The recipes were (and are) enormously valuable, and the volumes featured gorgeous food and travel photography. It also carries enormous cachet as an archival find, to have all 27 volumes at one’s fingertips as a means of exploring mid-century culinary culture. But what I really wanted to dive into was the series’ travelogue narratives, how each volume distilled 20 world cuisines (and six regional cuisines of the United States) into evocative narrative portraits in 200 pages or less. Because they were written in the years leading up to the American Bicentennial, the volumes constituted a sometimes reverential, sometimes critical consideration of what exactly it meant to be “American,” on and off the plate. They also contextualized American cuisine (in all its iterations) as one of many global culinary traditions, asserting that the boundaries of American food were as sophisticated, storied, and multifaceted as anything around the world.

As I wrote many moons ago, the late 1960s and 1970s were a time for constantly declaring–and contesting–the definition of “American food,” drawing boundaries around what was and was not “authentic” before we understood the dangers of such a hegemonic term (and, IMO, an unproductive way of thinking about food). But what was revealing in the fighting was the inherent subjectivity of what we think of as “national” cuisine. It was an era of “gastronationalism”, demonstrating how we understood the relationship between food and national identity, and inversely, and how national sentiments were affiliated with (and intimately intertwined with) food. Cookbooks can be brilliant texts of gastronationalism, because they take that ubiquitous aphorism of “You are what you eat” and apply it to national identity; we all eat x, therefore we are a “we,” and this book is us, with recipes. Yet the longer I work in American food, the more I think of it as an invention rather than a fact, cooked into being by countless communities and individuals until each dish is as known and natural as air. So the historically-minded cookbook is more than a document; it’s also a prescription, a fantasy of who we were that can be projected onto who we want to be.

So why am I finally cracking open these volumes, here in this chaotic year of 2026? I want to dive deep into the motivations behind such a project, to understand how we narrated the nation through food at the Bicentennial, to see what has aged well and poorly, what histories were elevated and which were smoothed over, and how “American food” became part of a larger global understanding of world cuisine. Especially as we approach the 250th (semiquincentennial) anniversary of America’s founding, it feels like the right moment to open up these books and question whether they’ve stood the test of time. Who were we, culinarily, in the historical cookbooks leading up to the Bicentennial…and how have our perspectives on American cuisine changed since then?

So now that I’m back on the Substack, here’s what you can expect between now and July 4th (the self-imposed deadline for this project): I’ll write about each of the volumes of these cookbooks–who helped put them together, the stories they tell, the claims they make. (It won’t necessarily be one post per book, or in clear chronological order, but rather I’ll post as I read and research.) When possible, I’ll also make a recipe from each book, with plenty of marginalia to share the results. And if I can truly get my act together, I may even posit what the next wave of American cookbooks might look like when we (if we?) approach America’s 300th with a coherent nation in place.

So in short…I hope you’ll stick with me. No matter what volume is on the menu each week, it’ll be quite a feast.