IOWA CITY -- What's in a cookbook, for most of history, has been much more than recipes.

With a collection of nearly 16,000 items from the 16th century to the 1960s, there's plenty to feast on at the Szathmary Culinary Manuscript Collection at the University of Iowa -- one of the top five collections in the country.

Encompassing America's culinary history and its roots around the world, thousands of books, manuscripts and pamphlets in the collection all seem to agree on one thing: We are what we eat.

"What we're hoping to do with this is tell the story of food, the history of food ways, how they grow and how the American dialect of food studies has changed since the founding in the 1700s," said Eric Ensley, curator of rare books and maps for the university's Special Collections & Archives. "The story of food is so much about communities living next to each other, among each other, and sharing with one another."

From handwritten manuscripts in the 1700s to hardbacks of the 20th century, here are some of the biggest lessons to read between the lines:

The idea of books strictly for recipes is a relatively modern one.

"Sometimes, we think of cookbooks as just recipes. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, we call them recipe books, but they're really just household books," Ensley said. "They're telling you how to run a household."

In a practice that dates to the Middle Ages, books would contain recipes alongside gardening tips, ailments for the common cold or headache and instructions on how to clean things well.

The Willis Family's 1833 cookbook from England, for example, details how to get a rose bush to bloom around Christmas, giving the reader blooms to adorn holiday cakes.

Librarians making various dishes at home for the Special Collections & Archives YouTube channel have found out the hard way: Following the recipe is not as easy as it sounds.

"There might be something lost in the recipe, because often they do not turn out very well," Ensley said.

Handwritten manuscripts from the 18th and 19th centuries in the Szathmary collection are written in longform paragraphs. But even in written detail, recipes of the past often were condensed into less explicit terms, relying on implied knowledge or contexts around cooking techniques that have been lost over time.

Some simply will say "bake" without noting how hot or big a fire or oven should be. Others will say "a cup of sugar," but a cup could vary substantially from household to household in the age before standardized measurements.

The standardized recipe format readers are familiar with today -- itemized ingredients and detailed step-by-step instructions -- did not start to emerge until the early 20th century, when affordable printing started to become more widespread after the Industrial Revolution.

Like the luxury handbags and expensive vehicles that serve as today's status symbols, American settlers had their own ways of showing how well they were doing.

If you want to try a dessert made in historically accurate terms, be prepared for a sugar rush.

"Desserts in this period would have been very sweet," Ensley said as he looked at the 1765 Herbert Beaver cookbook from Connecticut. "The idea was that if you had the money to make a dessert, you wanted to make it as sweet as possible to show you could afford the sugar."

Rose water was another popular ingredient of that age in the 1700s, resulting in many sweet, floral-forward desserts.

Others, like a hotel's confectionary book from 19th century Switzerland, detail elaborate, hand-drawn patterns for cake top designs. Even with context, some of them -- like a bear mauling a woman -- are quite peculiar to those who work in the collection.

"That's one we've never been able to figure out, why a bear mauling a young woman was an appropriate cake topper," Ensley said.

Conversely, others demonstrate resilience. A 1945 Ministry of Food booklet in the United Kingdom, at the end of World War II, dedicates a page on how to make substitutes for ingredients in rationed supply, such as cream, or how to use dehydrated milk to make icing.

Each recipe in it uses very little sugar and butter.

One distinctly American phenomenon through five centuries of library artifacts is the collaboration seen in a certain type of cookbooks.

One selection of this type, an 1800s Western Massachusetts book that was sold as a church fundraiser, became quite common throughout the country for many decades. Each page is laden with recipes from "Mrs." someone or another who was known for bringing her specialties to church potlucks and gatherings.

Many pages are also interspersed with advertisements -- notably, in the case of this 1800s book, for coal.

"These are very American," Ensley said. "I guess the association of community building through food is very American, but tying into that is assimilation into the American vernacular."

For immigrants settling into the new melting pot of the world, community building also was a balancing act of assimilating into a new society while retaining precious parts of one's identity.

"One of the most interesting things is the history of the movement of humanity -- how people come up against, come up with and come up beside different groups," Ensley said. "It's interesting to see how people navigate those different relationships."

A Jewish Iowa City cookbook from 1933 -- a time when Iowa City's Jewish population was much larger -- has recipes for "potato pancakes." But the term many call it today -- latkes -- did not start to widely appear in American Jewish cookbooks until the 1960s.

After a strong push to assimilate as much as possible through the 1940s and '50s, cultural terms from Yiddish and Hebrew were reclaimed as a part of building identity.

Even today, as immigration remains an evergreen source of political tension, food remains a conversation starter.

"It's a national conversation right now, what people as immigrants do with different cultures and how they navigate," Ensley said. "I think food is one way that helps us talk about a difficult subject in perhaps a way that's a bit more palatable."

Holiday celebrations like food and festivities used to be contained to a much smaller sphere of influence among families, regions and localities.

"If you were to have a Christmas feast in the 1700s and went across a swath of Europe and asked a thousand times, you'd get 900-some different answers about what Christmas looks like," Ensley said. "As time progresses, you get more dissemination of what a holiday should look like. Those begin to infiltrate into people's psyche on what should happen on a holiday."

The influence of pamphlets from corporations and governmental agencies starting in the 1940s and '50s started to nationalize the images of successful, middle class families through advertising disguised as helpful guides and recipes -- no matter the season.

Westinghouse could show you what success looked like by modeling a well-stocked refrigerator. Coca-Cola played an outsize role in shaping the public image of Santa Claus.

Manischewitz, a household name for kosher products, produced cookbooks for Hanukkah that listed matzah as an ingredient in latke recipes. "Latkes don't have matzah in them, but they sure do in the Manischewitz cookbook," Ensley noted.

While the food is different and the traditions may have been modified over the years, it's clear that a few elements have remained the same, no matter how much time has passed.

One observation: Christmas always has been a time for many to drink. A 1716 English manuscript's recipe for currant wine advises that it is "best made in large quantities," a common refrain across early Christmas recipes.

Another thing that hasn't changed is the connection between late-year holidays and enjoying the fruits of labor toiled throughout the year.

"No matter what people are doing ... the common thread is this image of a table that's full. We want to be around our family -- a time to be inside and not outside doing work," Ensley said.