Book excerpt: Cookbooks tell stories. They open up the worlds in which the people who wrote and read them once lived. In the hands of a good historian, cookbooks can be shown to contain the markings of political, social, and ideological changes that we conventionally locate outside the kitchen. Cookbooks allow us to trace the course of empires, of social roles, and of new nations over time. DANISH COOKBOOKS draws from three hundred years of Danish cookbooks to trace the growth of a bourgeois consciousness, the development of domesticity and gendered spheres, and the evolution of nationalism and a specific Danish identity from the early seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Like all prescriptive literature, cookbooks do not merely reflect the changes of the day but also constitute them. Historian Carol Gold reads recipes and cooking instructions for what they can tell us about literacy levels, division of labour in the kitchen and in society, and changes in the gendered aspects of publishing and using cookbooks. Gold explores the authors' instructions for economic and hygienic housekeeping and their sentiments about Danish identity as spelled out in dishes and spices. Just as the Danish nation would manage the body politic, so women were exhorted to manage the house and ensure the family's physical and moral health. Through the pages of cookbooks -- in recipes, menus, and table settings -- we can chart the growth of a nationalist Denmark and track the development of what it means to be a Dane. Written with the ease of a veteran historian and in an accessible and engaging style, DANISH COOKBOOKS will appeal to scholars in Scandinavian studies as well as in gender and women's studies. It will also appeal to non-academic readers interested in historical aspects of Danish nationalism and identity, women's social history, and cookbooks and cooking.