The Recipe Reader

Narratives - Contexts - Traditions

Janet Floyd, Laurel Forster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754608646
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351883184
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last decade there has been an intense and widespread interest in the writing and publishing of cookery books; yet there remains surprisingly little contextualized analysis of the recipe as a generic form. This essay collection asserts that the recipe in all its cultural and textual contexts - from the quintessential embodiment of lifestyle choices to the reflection of artistic aspiration - is a complex, distinct and important form of cultural expression. In this volume, contributors address questions raised by the recipe, its context, its cultural moment and mode of expression. Examples are drawn from such diverse areas as: nineteenth and twentieth-century private publications, official government documents, campaigning literature, magazines, and fictions as well as cookery writers themselves, cookbooks and TV cookery. In subjecting the recipe to close critical analysis, The Recipe Reader serves to move the study of this cultural form forward. It will interest scholars of literature, popular culture, social history and women's studies as well as food historians and professional food writers. Written in an accessible style, this collection of essays expands the range of writers under consideration, and brings new perspectives, contexts and arguments into the existing field of debate about cookery writing.

Chapter 1
The Recipe in its Cultural Contexts

Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster

Recipes surround us: in cookery books and magazines, in newspapers and television programmes, in films and novels, we seem continually to read about, observe and be encouraged to absorb ourselves in the preparation and serving of food. Recipes, instructional or indicative, are not, of course, exclusively concerned with the more or less complicated production of routine meals or the orchestration of feasts, though, in doing just that, they evoke the elaborate scene of home, and the contentious arena of domestic politics and family values. In their different appearances, they are also persistently drawn into cultural debates around health and purity, about lifestyle and individualism, and into definitions of the national past, present and future. This volume aims to bring together some of these disparate contexts and debates, in order to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the recipe illuminates the cultural worlds in which it appears, and constitutes a textual form worthy of study in its own right. Food and cookery are crucial elements in all cultures. To say that we are what we eat has become a truism, albeit one that has generated a burgeoning field of academic enquiry into food and meals. The work of cooking and the texts that represent that work to us, situated as they are between the purchase of food and its consumption, can scarcely be less important to our sense of identity and shared values than food itself.

Cookery texts do not only define and engage with our spheres of daily experience. Cultures supposedly foreign to us are continually called up for our consumption in recipes, as are regions distant from the urban centre. Cookery writing and travel writing have much in common. The popular discussion of travel includes as a key element the pursuit of 'authentic' food familiar from cookbooks and visual cookery texts. Furthermore, as fears about the impact of fast food (food that is not prepared domestically or in ways we like to acknowledge) act as a catalyst for fears about global capitalism, so the appearance of recipes imitating the cuisine of 'simple tribal folks' may provide some reassurance. If there is no escape from tentacles of multi-national business, at least 'good' food offers some trace of a lifestyle uncorrupted by commercialism (Hall, 1991, 39).

Whatever cultural needs, desires and aspirations have inspired our appetite for cookery texts, a mass market for such material certainly exists. It is not only that thousands of such texts containing recipes in various contexts are available to us. Each of those texts is stuffed with recipes. Graham Tomlinson (1986), taking a modest sample of twelve cookbooks as part of a study of instructional texts, found himself studying three thousand recipes. And indeed, besides cookery books, recipes appear in all manner of places: newspapers and magazines, diaries and calendars, as free leaflets with food purchases, on tea towels, aprons and even tableware.

Anthropologists have seen food as a code, finding linguistic or cultural meaning through a precise grammatical or lexical system (Lévi-Strauss 1966; Douglas, 1975). Psychologists and philosophers have looked for revelations about deeper aspects of human behaviour through studies of our food habits and customs (Curtin and Heldke, 1992). Others have seen the recipe as an 'embedded discourse' with a variety of relationships within the social context: amongst friends, neighbours, relatives or even wider communities (Leonardi, 1989). The recipe, in its intertextuality, is also itself a narrative which can engage the reader or cook in a 'conversation' about culture and history in which the recipe and its context provide part of the text and the reader imagines (or even eats) the rest. It is open to subjective intervention and interpretation, putting the reader in contact with the writer, making personal connections with a cultural moment or a community, and allowing the reader to interpolate herself into the text, making the narrative her own. Through this system of exchange the reader learns more about herself and the world. Thus the recipe, besides being a narrative in itself, offers us other stories too: of family sagas and community records, of historical and cultural moments or changes, and also personal histories and narratives of self.

In putting this volume together, we have looked to address the range and multiplicity of this form and to collate work that uses a range of strategies for reading the recipe as it appears in different forms, at different times and within different contexts. Our predecessors in the scholarly field have set out generic practices or looked at particular strands of recipe writing and theorised the work that it performs within particular spheres. Our aim has been to address the variousness of the recipe's appearances within and across genres - television programmes, oral histories, magazines, novels, government documents and of course cookbooks published and unpublished - and to place the recipe within a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Cookery texts, long attached to discussions of the continuities of community and the conventions of the writing of domesticity, are seen here in terms of a range of shifting practices and as imbricated in difficult debates about national, colonial, postcolonial, class, race and gender politics.

Such concerns have produced texts that are the object of many responses, and indeed of misrepresentation. Mrs Beeton's writings appear in contemporary culture as signifiers of conspicuous Victorian consumption. Elizabeth David is a national saviour. But, aside from assumptions about specific texts, the role of the recipe itself is a contentious matter. As we write, there is evidently something of a backlash against the ubiquitous presence of the recipe and an attempt by the high priests of cookery writing to recast its role. The British cookery writer and journalist Nigel Slater (2000) argues that he has 'always felt that there is more to cooking than obediently following a recipe. Working to someone else's set of rules, word for word, gram for gram, not only kills the possibilities of adapting a recipe to suit our taste, but also stifles the enjoyment of preparing a meal' (9). Here the recipe, for this is what Slater goes on to provide, is defined as an aid to the creative individual, while cooking is an activity on the cusp of art. Meanwhile, cookery books that eschew the merely instructional are much praised and gathered into the high cultural sphere. John Thome's Outlaw Cook (1992), according to one admiring reviewer, is 'more a novel than a cookbook': 'reading him on bread is like reading Proust on love'(Bateman, 1999). Thome's own argument is that the continual reproduction of recipes has produced a diminished cuisine: 'cookbook writers [are] passing the same recipes around and around' and 'each time one passes through their hands, they manage to make it faster and faster, leaner and leaner, until everything fuses together in a little black box (the microwave)'. Like Slater, Thome is keen to make a claim for the creativity of the individual cook as well as of cookery writing: 'It's easy to be seduced by other people's notions of a perfect pie and never to realise your own'(12).

As the creativity of cooking and recipe writing has become a given, at least in circles most involved with the gastronomic end of cookery, so originality has become a point at issue. Nigella Lawson, the British food writer and broadcaster, has been sharply criticised for not inventing her own recipes or generating variants on others', but instead paying others to find good recipes (Observer Food Magazine, 2002, 7). Yet the claims that creativity and originality are crucial to good recipe writing sit uneasily beside the other sine qua non of much contemporary cookery writing: authenticity. A recent edition of the BBC's Food Programme (2002) that focused on the impact of the current explosion of recipe writing made much of the skill of a particular chef, David Thompson, who has learned to cook Thai dishes not through recipes but through tasting and imitating the dishes themselves. This brings us back to the creativity of the chef as artist; a recipe for the education of lesser cooks was made available on the BBC website. But, at the same time, the discussion is also characteristic of a longstanding view of the recipe writer's purpose as one of recreating an authentic 'original'. To deviate from the authentic dish is, for some, a desecration. John and Karen Hess (1972), for example, claim that only the chosen few have the talent to produce a 'delicious variation' on a dish; only in circumstances where different tools and ingredients are available may a 'different dimension' be allowed. Indeed the Hesses' argument is that most recipe writers are involved in plagiarism from 'original' writers, and 'snitchers are invariably butchers ... slovenly thinkers and poor craftsmen who do not understand the construction of a dish ... [T]hey will destroy its balance and harmony because they are intent on disguising the fact that it is stolen property' (138-139). Thus creativity and authenticity jostle with one another as terms shaping the recipe's meaning and purpose.

For as many of the cookery texts mat express the cook s creativity or prompt our own, or that strive to recreate the art of the original, as many others are concerned to guide their readers and viewers conscientiously through the minutiae of the simplest of recipes. In fact the two categories are not exclusive. M. F. K. Fisher (1983), the doyenne of US cookery writing in its high cultural guise, has ruefully written of contemporary domestic cooks' dependence on instruction: 'as a spoilt idiot-child of the twentieth century, I want to be told' (17). But the association between cookery and a mode of training that embraces the inculcation of rules of social behaviour reaches rather further back. Insofar as cooking famously deals with the definition of what is raw, uncivilised and unpalatable, and its transformation into what can be shared and understood, ingested and enjoyed, it is plainly of crucial significance to the experience of social relations. Indeed for many decades food advertising has played on this so that Western culture now demands such transformations as part of the civilising process of society (Williamson, 1978).

Recipe books, as they structure meals, have participated in the formalisation of social rules. Different writers have placed this in different lights. For example, Val Mars (1993) writes of the ways in which middle-and upper-class Victorian children were permitted only blandly flavoured foodstuffs, for fear of stimulating their appetites. Their parents meanwhile feasted on meals in which varying cuisines were promiscuously mixed, and where meat, symbol of wildness and passion, dominated not only the table, but the decoration of the room (Ames, 1992). Laura Shapiro (1986) has described the cookery classes of the late nineteenth-century domestic science movement in America in which styles of cooking perceived as American were enforced, and the cuisine the domestic scientists chose to understand as foreign was suppressed. More generally, recipes may be linked with the impulse to rule, hierarchise and differentiate. Jack Goody (1977), emphasising the relationship between the recipe and the list, begins his discussion of the recipe form with the image of the high table at St John's Cambridge, where the list of diners, the seating list and the menu listing dishes recall the shopping list and the recipe that have enabled the scene of ranking and exclusion to take place (143). Recipes are lists, at least in part. Cookery books dictate the structures of meals, the size of servings. Cooking, writes Graham Tomlinson (1986), 'may represent the most instructed activity for the general populace in our society' (203).

The relationship between cooking and community does not have to be read wholly in terms of regulation, however, and some of the most important and elaborated discussions of recipe writing have seen this form of writing as working to draw together, memorialise and imagine supportive communities. The recovery of a feminist history of recipe writing is perhaps the most prominent expression of this. An important starting-point for the study of recipe writing was Susan Leonardi's 1989 article, 'Recipes for Reading', which argued that recipes do the work of constructing communities amongst women. Through the discovery, reading and even putting into practice of other women's recipes an imagined community is built. Real communities too are expressed and documented through recipes, and modes of cookery, or cookbooks, collectively assembled as a community enterprise (Bower, 1997).

Meanwhile, in the wake of Leonardi's article, literary scholars have revisited cookery books and have recast them as a form available for women's creative expression. Food, cookery and recipes, at times understood as part of the patriarchal power system, cultural instruction and control of women, have been reclaimed by feminist writers. Not only have feminist historians done much to bring to light moments in history and cultures when women were empowered rather than disempowered by their relationship to food; the recipe itself, often seen as a peculiarly female form of writing, has also been seen as an opportunity for women to creatively record and inscribe individual lives and situations, for example in the many private, personalised cookbooks never intended for publication. Janet Theophano (2002) discusses the 'expressive potential' of cookbooks, arguing that cookbooks are 'opportunities for women to write themselves into being' (5, 9). Accordingly the recipe has formed part of, or has been surrounded by, other kinds of writing: letters, diaries, fictions, polemic.

Whether recipes and cookery books enforce social norms, draw together communities or provide an arena for individual expression, they evidently participate in a social world in which meals are highly significant rituals and where patterns of behaviour stretching back into the past are illustrated and re-illustrated. Ann Romines (1997) has written of the cookbooks that 'have been there all my life, a dark presence on the shelf, in my mother's kitchen and now in mine. They were not for show, like the bright pottery and the embroidered dishtowels; over the years they grew more shabby, spotted and worn. But on occasions of ceremony and necessity ... they were consulted like oracles'(75).

Equally, though, it is possible to think of recipes as defined by moments of profound change. As Stephen Mennell (1985) and others have pointed out, cookery books were amongst the earliest of printed books (65), associated at the start with the symbolism required of aristocratic feasting. Recipes, once called 'receipts', are a form that is produced by writing down what is received and agreed information. As well as linking with traditions of the invention of writing and the structures of feudalism and autocracy, this etymological origin may also be used to argue for the ambiguous position of recipes within a process of exchange. Luce Giard (1998) thinks of recipes as 'multiplications of borrowing' (178). The root of the word recipe, the Latin word recipere, meaning both to give and to receive, reminds us that the instructions that appear to tie down the form of a dish to be shared exist in a perpetual state of exchange.

This process of giving and taking, partaking and retaining, is a context for cookery writing which has endured to the present form of cookery writing in the best-selling form that we know it today. Mass migration from country to city and from nation to nation or colony from the early nineteenth century produced a range of cookery books to deal with the range of new social situations: cookbooks for the upwardly mobile and their servants, for emigrants, for colonial administrators and settlers. Moreover, as Jack Goody (1977) writes, the popular cookery book of our own experience is a form arising out of an urbanising scene in which the market and the shop make ingredients available (140). In the rural context, methods of cooking were transmitted orally if necessary. And for most rural dwellers, the cooking of food was scarcely an elaborate matter needing to be carefully transmitted. Asked by Giard (1998) about recipes handed down, a group of peasant women from the Jura Mountains replied: 'our grandmothers did not have culinary customs, we were too poor; they mixed everything in a big pot that cooked slowly ... above the fire, and it was imperative not to waste anything' (177).

This is not how many historians of cookery see things. For many, cookery books are a rural tradition and the best cookery books must strive to recover the tenuous traces of the rural past decimated by industrialisation. A recent review of a new edition of Maria Rundell asks: 'Where did the tenderness go that Rundell bestowed on spinach, sorrel and cabbage which were to be put in the pan with "no water but what hangs to the leaves from washing"? Buried under the bricky industrial terraces and laid, with a sprig of rosemary, in the graves of the last British peasantry and yeoman farmers' (Rule, 2000). In the terms of historical accuracy, this is close to whimsy. But cookery writing is indeed frequently involved in the work of imaginatively recreating the past, often a rural past, and sometimes an aristocratic tradition too.

Personal histories or pasts, constructed through memory, or the process of remembering with others, are often centred on food: favourite childhood dishes, special family occasions, first attempts to cook, celebration meals out and so on. The olefactory sense is often particularly acute in memory. Such clear recollections may include phenomenal elements or sensations of taste; feelings of pleasure and visual images may form a distinctive state of 'awareness we associate with remembering', thus linking food memories of taste, smell, technique and appearance with other wider, surrounding factors. This heightened memory concerning the senses has been called 'autonetic consciousness' (Robinson, 1978, 237). Just as we are what we eat psychologically, food constructs us too.

Other kinds of memory are also associated with food and the recipe. It has been argued, for instance, that food and its preparation '[require] a multiple memory: a memory of apprenticeship, of witnessed gestures, and of consistencies' (Giard, 1998, 157). It requires memory to know how to cook but, at the same time, a more pragmatic, everyday memory function is needed to put the food on the table, to think what is in the larder, to work out which recipe can be adapted, which are the family's favourite meals, who is coming to dinner and so on.

Food and recipes feed other parts of our lives too, as is clearly witnessed by the creative deployment of food, recipes and cooking in fictional narratives of novel and film. Links between literary structure and cookery have been made (Bevan, 1988; Schofield, 1989) which claim food as metaphor for many other aspects of life in its sensual and anecdotal malleability. Some works of fiction have been structured by food and recipes, others work such material into their story-lines. Food as part of our daily routine can be used to great effect in fictitious form, where it can be given a different treatment. If food has long been the subject of poetry and prose, it has also become an increasingly significant aspect of the subject matter, metaphorical message and mise en scène of films too (Poole, 1999), and perhaps has become something extraordinary or even bizarrely unfamiliar, to once again make us consider afresh our daily relationship with food.

It is this malleability of cooking and food, and in particular the text of the recipe, across diverse cultural, social, geographical and personal contexts which informs this collection of essays. The interdisciplinarity of the essays, their historical breadth, and most importantly, their examination of the sheer range of different forms of the recipe, each informed and interpreted by its surrounding discourse, will create, we hope, an expansion of the appreciation of this important textual and cultural form.

Our emphasis in this volume, then, has been to offer the reader a sample of the breadth of contexts through which the recipe may be understood. The contributors, drawing on a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives, offer distinctive and overlapping approaches to the analysis of recipes in their many different appearances. But we begin with readings that are suggestive of the varying ways in which we might narrate traditions of recipe writing. Margaret Beetham's essay tackles one of the key figures through whom we engage with the recipe writing of the past, Isabella Beeton. Moving beyond the well-trodden discussion of Beeton's career, this essay looks at the brand 'Mrs Beeton', at the publishing interests that used her name, and the ways in which this figure spoke for and to the British middle classes of the era. This is a discussion that links Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management with the market for cookbooks produced by social mobility. At the same time, it also reaches back to the oppositions of nature and culture set out by Levi-Strauss to consider what is made central and what is marginalised in Beeton's Victorian domestic world.

Andrea Newlyn's essay turns back to the familiar scene of the nineteenth-century home, family and community, looking at the presence of a mass of private, unpublished cookbooks produced by women. In a close examination of the composition of these cookbooks, she explores the fine grain of their negotiation of the same ideological premises about domesticity that Beetham addresses. Newlyn is particularly interested, though, in the form that these texts take. These cookbooks offer a paradigm of narrative form that has as much bearing on the discussion of women's writing generally as it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Recipe in its Cultural Contexts
• TRADITIONS
• INDIVIDUAL INTERVENTIONS
• CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index