Spice up your cookbook: innovations in mid-twentieth-century cookbook design

During the 1960s the illustrated cookbook format changed to reflect a move from escapism to instruction in response to greater affluence. During this period activities such as home entertaining became more widespread. The material value of the cookbook also changed, and publishers were taking a more radical approach to book design to attract audiences who had become weary of the traditional book layout and who wanted to cook more extravagant meals. The role illustration played became more important as it reinforced the originality of these design-led cookbooks but also provided focus as to how these cookbooks should be used and read. Alan Cracknell’s illustrations for Arabella Boxer’s First Slice Your Cookbook (Nelson, 1964) provides an example of how illustration was used to support the writer’s unique and distinctive approaches to food and cookery, and to further emphasize the culinary tastes, trends and pursuits that were colonising the 1960s home with imagery that also recollected the past. This article, drawn from interviews with Arabella Boxer and Alan Cracknell, explores how the subject matter in Cracknell’s intricately designed illustrations visually amplified the history and provenance of each course. It also investigates how the cookbook’s innovative three-tier menu design system, conceived by Arabella Boxer’s then husband Mark, encouraged its readers to cook differently and how it helped to advance their culinary, historical and design literacy.